The Network Processing Forum (NPF) has added four new software implementation agreements aimed at speeding the development and lowering the cost of network platforms. The four implementation agreements are:
MPLS Forwarding Service APIs with Diffserv and TE Extensions — these provide an open and generic interface for control plane software components to configure and manage the forwarding plane elements of the MPLS layer. The Forum believes that MPLS is ideally suited to be implemented on network processors and that this IA will greatly simplify the task network equipment vendors face in designing and implementing MPLS on such devices. The IA provides a vendor neutral API for control plane stacks such as LDP and RSVP-TE.
IPv6 Unicast Forwarding Services API — this provides a vendor-neutral programming interface to configure and manage any IPv6 Forwarding Information Base (FIB). It could be used to configure and manage address resolution tables and it includes unified and discrete mode versions similar to those found in the IPv4 Forwarding Services API announced earlier this year.
Packet Handler API — this facilitates the transfer of packets between the data plane forwarding elements and control plane applications for control or exception path processing. Control plane applications such as signaling stacks can use this API to send and receive packets from network processing elements.
Version 2.0 of the Software API — this provides documentation conventions used within all API specifications produced by the NPF Software Working Group.
