6WINDGate™ - Architecture Overview - NE 6W-08-188 ... - Wind River

2.1 NETWORK EQUIPMENT ARCHITECTURE
2.1.1 General concepts
6WINDGate - Architecture Overview NE 6W-08-188 v1.0
2 GENERAL CONCEPTS
Model v1.1
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Architecture of network equipment has been heavily studied over the years. Main concepts of an efficient
architecture were defined some years ago to be able to design high-speed routers to face the explosion
of Internet traffic. Now, this architecture has been extended to new services such as L2 protocols,
security, mobility, multicast…
IP-based equipment can be partitioned into three basic elements: Data Plane, Control Plane and
Management Plane (cf. Figure 1).
2.1.2 Data Plane
Figure 1: Network Equipment Architecture
The Data Plane is a subsystem of a network node that receives and sends packets from an interface,
processes them in some way required by the applicable protocol, and delivers, drops, or forwards them
as appropriate.
For routing functions, it consists of a set of procedures (algorithms) that a router uses to make a
forwarding decision on a packet. The algorithms define the information from a received packet to find a
particular entry in its forwarding table, as well as the exact procedures that the routing function uses for
finding the entry. It offloads packet forwarding from higher-level processors. For most or all of the
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