Cisco Technology, Inc.

Neale David Raymond Ranns

Ijsbrand Wijnands

David Delano Ward

David Richard Barach

Carlos M Pignataro

Nagendra Kumar Nainar

Gregory J Shepherd

Stewart Frederick Bryant

Crispin Nicholas Dent-Young

Alan J Cheilek

Robert J Shearman

In one embodiment, an offload platform is an compute platform, adjunct to a router or other packet switching device, that performs packet processing operations including determining an egress forwarding value corresponding to the next-hop node of the packet switching device to which to send an offload-platform processed packet. The offload platform downloads forwarding information from the router, and augments it, such as, but not limited to, representing interfaces of the router as identifiable virtual interface(s) on the offload platform, and including each of one or more next-hop nodes of the router represented as an identifiable virtual adjacency and identifiable tunnel (e.g., identified by the egress forwarding value). In one embodiment, the egress forwarding value is an Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) label or Segment Routing Identifier. The router identifies packets of certain packet flows to send to the adjunct offload platform, rather than processing per its routing information base.

Processing packets by an offload platform adjunct to a packet switching device

In one embodiment, a method, system, and apparatus is for storing an assigned operations, administration and management (OAM) bitstring in a memory in a BIER (Bit Index Explicit Replication) enabled router, the OAM bitstring being assigned to a BIER domain, the semantic of the OAM bitstring being to replicate and forward the OAM bitstring to neighboring bit-forwarding routers (BFRs), generating an OAM probe packet including the OAM bitstring, setting a BFR ID associated with a first BFR as a BIER header bitstring in the OAM probe packet, setting a TTL (time to live) field in the OAM probe packet to be 2, sending the OAM probe packet to a next hop BFR, and performing one of receiving the OAM probe packet back from the first BFR, and taking an alternative action if the OAM probe packet is not received back from the first BFR.

BIER forwarding validation

In one embodiment, a provider edge packet switching device of a provider network is configured with different Internet Protocol (IP) forwarding information bases (FIBs) depending on whether the forwarding information base is associated with core-facing ingress packet traffic (e.g., packet traffic from the provider network) or customer-facing ingress packet traffic (e.g., packet traffic from a customer network). In the latter case of customer-facing ingress packet traffic, the customer-facing forwarding information base includes load balancing lookup results for load balancing traffic between a customer edge packet switching device and through the provider network. In the case of core-facing ingress packet traffic, the core-facing forwarding information base includes a lookup result for forwarding traffic to a customer edge packet switching device, and does not include the above-referenced load balancing lookup result information.

Different forwarding of packets based on whether received from a core or customer network

In one embodiment, for each particular multicast flow of a plurality of multicast flows of packets a particular consolidation encoding of a plurality of consolidation encodings is selected based on the sparseness of bit positions within a bit string corresponding to designated receiving packet switching devices of the particular multicast flow. The packet switching device sends one or more packets corresponding to said particular packet, with each of these one or more packets including designated receiving packet switching devices of the particular multicast flow in the header of said particular packet according to the particular consolidation encoding. In one embodiment, different consolidation encodings of the plurality of consolidation encodings are used for at least two different multicast flows of the plurality of multicast flows of packets. In one embodiment, each of said receiving packet switching devices is Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER) Bit-Forwarding Router (BFR).

Consolidation encodings representing designated receivers in a bit string

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Basingstoke, United Kingdom

Neale David Raymond Ranns