Reducing network and appliances load through cooperative control plane decisions

摘要

Systems and methods for forwarding data packets in a communications network, the method comprising: providing information included in a first portion of a data packet to a network policy unit, in response to a forwarding device receiving a data packet to be forwarded over one or more network routes; forwarding the data packet according to a flow policy, in response to the forwarding device receiving the flow policy from the network policy unit, wherein the flow policy applied to the data packet by the forwarding device is determined by the network policy unit based on the network policy unit performing an analysis of the information included in the first portion of the data packet in view of policy information provided to the network policy unit.