Adopting software engineering practices to network processor devices introducing the Domain Specific Modeling paradigm to the ForCES Framework

IETF´s new Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES) architecture specifies the ForCES model providing an accurate description of the Forwarding Plane in an Object-Oriented fashion. However, the model is described totally in an XML Schema Definition (XSD): it is well-defined but purely machine oriented, being readable and usable, thus not human-friendly and difficult extending itself in the future. We argue that the ForCES model is actually a meta-model that is used to model ForCES components, e.g. Logical Function Blocks (LFBs), that later are used in ForCES applications. This paper presents a methodology based on a case study on how to automate the process of configuring the forwarding plane of network devices using state-of-the-art model-driven techniques in a tangible way while specifying a tool supported by a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for ForCES. We first consider describing the ForCES XSD based meta-model to a more manageable Ecore (MOF) based meta-model and then we create a DSL based on this Ecore meta-model. Then we target to transform automatically a Platform Independent ForCES model specified in the DSL to an executable target source code (Platform Specific: XML-ForCES compliant, C++, Java) able to communicate with the ForCES protocol.