Hi, Much has been said about managing forwarding and control plane separation in DMM. AERO now has a new method for doing this based on DHCPv6.
In AERO, the control plane is managed by the AERO Server. AERO Clients use DHCPv6 PD messaging in order to register themselves with AERO Servers and to update their access network addresses based on mobility events. The AERO Server in turn maintains PD state for each AERO Client and also provides default forwarding services for each Client. However, it would be desirable for Servers to offload forwarding services to Forwarding Agents that can handle high-speed data plane operations and therefore offload the Server. In order to support this offload, when the AERO Server prepares a Reply to a Client's DHCPv6 Request/Renew/Rebind/Release message, it forwards the Reply to the Forwarding Agent instead of directly to the Client. The Forwarding Agent then creates forwarding state and returns the Reply to the Server, which then forwards the Reply to the Client. Now, the Server and Forwarding Agent both have the necessary state synchronization, or if any control messages are lost the Client will retransmit. Future data packets can then flow through the Forwarding Agent without burdening the Server. This behavior now documented in Section 3.16 of the AERO spec: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-templin-aerolink/ With this behavior, the AERO Server and Forwarding Agent act as two halves of a whole router, with the Server handling the control plane and the Forwarding Agent handling the data plane. Each Server can further associate with multiple Forwarding Agents if there is a desire to distribute the data plane function to multiple agents. This is a simple and effective solution for DMM forwarding and control plane separation. I would be happy to talk more about this either on the list or at the upcoming IETF. Comments? Thanks - Fred fred.l.temp...@boeing.com _______________________________________________ dmm mailing list dmm@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dmm
