Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES) Logical Functional Block (LFB) Subsidiary Management

Abstract

Deployment experience has demonstrated the value of using the Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES) architecture to manage resources other than packet forwarding. In that spirit, the Forwarding Element Manager (FEM) is modeled by creating a Logical Functional Block (LFB) to represent its functionality. We refer to this LFB as the Subsidiary Mechanism (SM) LFB. A Control Element (CE) that controls a Forwarding Element's (FE) resources can also manage its configuration via the SM LFB. This document introduces the SM LFB class, an LFB class that specifies the configuration parameters of an FE. The configuration parameters include new LFB class loading and CE associations; they also provide manipulation of debug mechanisms along with a general purpose attribute definition to describe configuration information.