In this work, our main objective is to explore how Software Routers (SRs) can deploy advanced and flexible paradigms for supporting novel control plane functionalities and applications. To this purpose, we investigate and study a new open-source SW framework, namely Distributed SW ROuter Project (DROP), which aims at developing and enabling a novel distributed paradigm for IP-router control and management. DROP is partially based on the main guidelines of the IETF ForCES standard, and it allows building logical network nodes through the aggregation of multiple SRs, which can be devoted to packet forwarding or control operations. In addition to the original ForCES design, DROP will aim at extending router distribution and aggregation concepts by moving them at a network-wide scale in order to enable and to support value-added services for next-generation networks.
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