The present application provides a packet processing method, device and system. A controller sends a first flow entry to a network device. The first flow entry comprises first importance information used for indicating importance of a first flow entry, where the first importance information is used by the network device to determine, according to a second importance information of a second flow entry in the flow table and the first importance information of the first flow entry, whether to add the first flow entry into a flow table of the network device when there is no idle flow entry resource in the flow table.

Implementations of discovery functionalities in accordance with the present invention are characterized by being exceptionally minimalistic. A primary reason and benefit for such minimalistic implementations relate to these discovery functionalities being implemented via a management processor and associated resources of a system on a chip (SoC) unit as opposed to them being implemented on data processing components of a cluster of nodes (i.e., central processing core components). By focusing on such a minimalist implementation, embodiments of the present invention allow discovery functionalities to be implemented on a relatively low-cost low-power management processor coupled to processing cores that provide for data serving functionality in the cluster of nodes.

A method, in a network controller of a control plane in a software defined network (SDN) coupled to a network element (NE) of a data plane in the SDN, of resynchronizing forwarding table entries of the NE according to forwarding table entries of the network controller is disclosed. The method includes causing the NE to update a first subset of forwarding table entries from a set of one or more of forwarding table entries to include a post-synchronization indicator. The method continues with causing the NE to delete, following the update of the first subset of forwarding table entries, a second subset of zero or more forwarding table entries from the set of forwarding table entries, where each forwarding table entry from the second subset includes a pre-synchronization indicator.

A data processing system with routing tables comprising an operating system for supporting processes, such that the process are associated with one or more resources and the operating system being arranged to police the accessing by processes of resources so as to inhibit a process from accessing resources with which it is not associated. Part of this system is an interface for interfacing between each process and the operating system and a memory for storing state information for at least one process. The interface may be arranged to analyze instructions from the processes to the operating system, and upon detecting an instruction to re-initialize a process cause state information corresponding to that pre-existing state information to be stored in the memory as state information for the re-initialized process and to be associated with the resource.

A method for programming route hardware in network devices. The method includes: receiving, by a network device, route updates, selecting from the route updates, a set of selected routes to be used for routing, assigning multiple timestamps to the set of selected routes, programming the set of selected routes into a software-implemented forwarding information base (FIB), segmenting the set of selected routes in the software-implemented FIB into at least a first batch of routes and a second batch of routes, programming the first batch of routes into a hardware-implemented FIB, after the programming, determining a last timestamp, where the last time stamp is the oldest timestamp of the timestamps where all routes associated with the last timestamp have been successfully programmed into the hardware-implemented FIB, and advertising all routes of the first batch that are associated with a timestamp that is no older than the last timestamp.

Example embodiments relate to a method of, and device for facilitating, resilient peer-to-peer application message routing. The method comprises storing a network routing table comprising destination addresses of applications hosted on peer nodes of a network, and providing the peer nodes with a copy of the routing table via which routing table an application message from any one of the peer nodes is routed to a destination address designating a destination application hosted by a destination peer node. Further, the method comprises providing, when the destination application hosted by the destination peer node is inactivated, all peer nodes with a copy of an updated routing table taking into account the inactivation of said application, wherein a further application message addressed from any one of the peer nodes to the destination address associated with the inactivated application is routed via the updated routing table, to an alternative destination application having the same destination address as the inactivated application.

Exemplary methods include generating a first fast reroute (FRR) next hop (NH) comprising of a first primary next hop (PNH), a first secondary next hop (SNH), and a first attribute, wherein the first PNH and first SNH include forwarding information that causes traffic to be forwarded towards a second and third network device, respectively. The methods include sending a first request to a forwarding plane to generate a second FRR NH comprising of a second PNH, a second SNH, and a second attribute. The methods include updating contents of the first FRR NH, and sending a second request to the forwarding plane to update the second FRR NH, wherein the second request causes the forwarding plane to determine whether to revert back to using the second PNH based on whether the first attribute included in the second request is different from the second attribute of the second FRR NH.

A forwarding path link table packet is generated, the forwarding path link table packet comprises forwarding information of each SDN switch on a forwarding path; and the forwarding path link table packet is delivered to any one of SDN switches on the forwarding path, to enable the forwarding path link table packet to be delivered among SDN switches on the forwarding path, so as to cause each SDN switch that receives the forwarding path link table packet to generate a forwarding flow table entry of the SDN switch according to the forwarding information of the SDN switch in the forwarding path link table packet, and forward the forwarding path link table packet on the forwarding path.

Methods, devices, and systems for mapping transport segment labels to packet network endpoints using a mapping server. In some implementations, an end point address in an edge domain is received from an edge router, a mapping of one of the end point address to a transport segment label is received from a network device, the mapping is stored in a non-transitory memory device, and the mapping is transmitted to the edge router.

A method supporting a distributed resilient network interconnect (DRNI) in a link aggregation group at a network device is disclosed. The method starts with receiving a distributed relay control protocol data unit (DRCPDU), where the DRCPDU includes neighbor network device's state information and configuration information, wherein the configuration information includes its operational aggregation key, gateway digest, port digest. The method continue with determine whether or not the received configuration information is different from the one of the network device and how, and causing the next DRCPDU to be transmitted to the neighbor network device to include or not include certain information accordingly.