Friday, April 11, 2008

Control Plane


Routers are like junctions whereas subnets are like streets and hosts like houses
Control Plane processing leads to the construction of what is variously called a routing table or routing information base (RIB). The RIB may be used by the Forwarding Plane to look up the outbound interface for a given packet, or, depending on the router implementation, the Control Plane may populate a separate Forwarding Information Base (FIB) with destination information. RIBs are optimized for efficient updating with control mechanisms such as routing protocols, while FIBs are optimized for the fastest possible lookup of the information needed to select the outbound interface.
The Control Plane constructs the routing table from knowledge of the up/down status of its local interfaces, from hard-coded static routes, and from exchanging routing protocol information with other routers. It is not compulsory for a router to use routing protocols to function, if for example it was configured solely with static routes. The routing table stores the best routes to certain network destinations, the "routing metrics" associated with those routes, and the path to the next hop router.
Routers do maintain state on the routes in the RIB/routing table, but this is quite distinct from not maintaining state on individual packets that have been forwarded.

In routing, the control plane is the part of the router architecture that is concerned with drawing the network map, or the information in a (possibly augmented) routing table that defines what to do with incoming packets. Control plane functions, such as participating in routing protocols, run in the architectural control element.In most cases, the routing table will contain a list of destination addresses and the outgoing interface(s) associated with them. Control plane logic also can define certain packets to be discarded, as well as preferential treatment of certain packets for which a high quality of service is defined by such mechanisms as differentiated services.
Depending on the specific router implementation, there may be a separate Forwarding Information Base that is populated (i.e., loaded) by the Control Plane, but used by the Forwarding Plane to look up packets, at very high speed, and decide how to handle them.

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