A method may include bridging in, via a fabric, a multicast data packet from a source device to a first edge device of a plurality of edge devices and flooding the multicast data packet to the plurality of edge devices within a mutual subnetwork of the fabric. The method further includes bridging out the multicast data packet from a second edge device of the plurality of edge devices to a receiving device. The source device and the receiving device are located within the mutual subnetwork.

A system comprises an edge services controller configured to: compute, based on a physical topology of physical links that connect a plurality of network interface cards (NICs) that comprise embedded switches and processing units coupled to the embedded switches, a virtual topology comprising a strict subset of the physical links; and program the virtual topology into the respective processing units of the NICs to cause the processing units of the NICs to send data packets via physical links in the strict subset of the physical links.

A system for layer-2 path tracing is provided. During operation, the system can send, from an originating device, a layer-2 trace packet with a packet type in a layer-2 header of the layer-2 trace packet. The packet type can indicate the trace packet to be a tracing packet. The system can then receive a layer-2 response packet from a respective participating device, which supports layer-2 path tracing, on a path to a target device of the trace packet. Subsequently, the system can obtain, from a payload of the response packet, trace information of a forward path to the participating device traversed by the trace packet and a reverse path from the participating device traversed by the response packet. The trace information can identify one or more layer-2 devices along the forward and reverse paths, and include one or more layer-2 identifiers corresponding to the identified one or more layer-2 devices.

Embodiments of the present invention provide systems, methods, and computer storage media directed to propagating and authenticating border gateway protocol route advertisements. A trusted authority device stores and distributes routing information for various autonomous systems. The trusted authority device also issues and maintains digital certificates that are each assigned to one of the autonomous systems. The digital certificate can be utilized by autonomous systems to verify the authenticity of routing information advertised by another autonomous system. Each autonomous system can employ a routing device that can generate a route advertisement based on routing information received from the trusted authority device. The route advertisement can include a digital signature, a digital certificate, and a time-to-live value, among other things, each of which can be utilized by routing devices of other autonomous systems to determine the authenticity and validity of received routing information.

Disclosed herein a source routing apparatus and method in ICN. The method includes: receiving an interest packet; extracting a current entry value when the received interest packet includes a forwarding hint; using the extracted current entry value as an index of a path list; extracting a name of the interest packet; reducing the current entry value when the interest packet is transmitted to a network area of the path list; performing a FIB lookup with the extracted name; determining an output port using the FIB lookup; and transmitting the interest packet to the output port.

An integrated access and backhaul (IAB) node may receive a parent knowledge message, the parent knowledge message indicating whether a parent IAB node of the child IAB node has received an optional signaling message, determining to transition between first resources and second resources at a transition time, the first resources being associated with use of a mobile termination of the child IAB node, the second resources being associated with use of the distributed unit of the child IAB node, and determine a number of guard symbols provided by the parent IAB node at the transition time based on whether the parent knowledge message indicates that the parent IAB node has received the optional signaling message.

A router configured as an autonomous system border router (ASBR) in a local autonomous system (AS), includes: (1) a control component for communicating and computing routing information, the control component running a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and peering with at least one BGP peer device in an outside autonomous system (AS) different from the local AS; and (2) a forwarding component for forwarding packets using forwarding information derived from the routing information computed by the control component, wherein the control component (i) receives reachability information for an external prefix corresponding to a device outside the local AS, and (ii) associates the external prefix, as a BGP next hop (B_NH), an abstract next hop (ANH) that identifies a set of BGP (eBGP) sessions that contains at least one eBGP session over which given external prefix has been learned, each of the at least one eBGP sessions being between the ASBR and a BGP peer device in an AS outside the AS, wherein the device located outside the local AS is reachable via the BGP peer device.

This application provides a packet processing method and a device. In this application, a control identifier field is added to a packet, and the control identifier field indicates whether forwarding of the packet is allowed when a resource corresponding to a slice identifier fails to be matched. The control identifier field and a slice identifier of a network slice are carried in the packet, so that the slice identifier and the control identifier field are transmitted on a network together. When a receive end fails to match the resource corresponding to the slice identifier, the receive end can discard the packet based on the control identifier field, instead of forwarding the packet by using routing information.

A Self-Describing Packet block (SDPB) is defined that allows concurrent processing of various fixed headers in a packet block defined to take advantage of multiple cores in a networking node forwarding path architecture. SPDB allows concurrent processing of various pieces of header data, metadata, and conditional commands carried in the same data packet by checking a serialization flag set upon creation of the data packet, without needing to serialize the processing or even parsing of the packet. When one or h more commands in one or more sub-blocks may be processed concurrently, the one or more commands are distributed to multiple processing resources for processing the commands in parallel. This architecture allows multiple unique functionalities each with their own separate outcome (execution of commands, doing service chaining, performing telemetry, allows virtualization and path steering) to be performed concurrently with simplified packet architecture without incurring additional encapsulation overhead.

A router may include input buffers that receive a packet being transmitted from a source to a destination, a state generator that determines a state for the packet, and a memory representing weights for actions corresponding to possible states. The memory may be configured to return an action corresponding to the state of the packet, where the action may indicate a next hop in the route between the source and the destination. The router may also include reward logic configured to generate the weights for the plurality of actions in the memory. The reward logic may receive a global reward corresponding to the route between the source and the destination, calculate a local reward corresponding to next hops available to the router; and combine the global reward and the local reward to generate the weights for the plurality of actions in the memory.