Control and communication mechanisms of a SoftRouter

The requirements on IP routers are increasing for every new generation of designs. The driving forces are growing traffic volumes and demands for new services. We argue that the SoftRouter architecture that separates the implementation of control plane functions from packet forwarding functions would improve the scalability, flexibility and reliability of future routers. This paper presents the design and implementation of such a SoftRouter, focusing on the internal discovery protocols and reliable communication protocols. In particular, a novel hierarchy error recovery algorithm has been applied and evaluated in our experimental environments.