[e2e] NDDI & OpenFlow

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Zartash Afzal Uzmi <zartash at lums.edu.pk>

    > I still have to convince myself that it will be a feasible idea to
    > replace FIB with a more complex flow table in the service provider core

Please see the "Flow identification" subsection of Section 2.2 "Packet Format
Fields" of RFC-1753, in particular the parts about aggregated flows; and then
look at the MPLS header specification. While not designed specifically to
meet the RFC-1753 requirements, MPLS looks the way it does in part because
the architectural issues that come up when you get into flow-based packet
handling are pretty generic.

(MPLS was designed to be a switching substrate that could support a number of
different 'service models' at the internetworking layer [no, I do not mean
IPvN by that term - I mean this more generically, as in 'the layer that gets
bits from A to B, where A and B are anywhere], both pure datagram, and also
flow-based. I have no idea if Openflow uses MPLS hardware to actually move
packets around - haven't read the docs yet - but there is no reason not to.)

	Noel