RFC 2124 (rfc2124) - Page 2 of 21
Cabletron's Light-weight Flow Admission Protocol Specification Version 1
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2124 LFAP March 1997 4.1. FAA Related Error Handling ............................. 19 4.2. FUA Related Error Handling ............................. 19 4.3. FCA Related Error Handling ............................. 19 4.4. ARA Related Error Handling ............................. 20 5. Security Considerations ....................................... 20 6. Author's Addresses ............................................ 20 7. References .................................................... 21 1. Introduction Light-weight Flow Admission Protocol, LFAP, allows an external Flow Admission Service (FAS) to manage flow admission at the switch, allowing flexible Flow Admission Services to be deployed by a vendor or customer without changes to, or undue burden on, the switch. It provides a means for network managers, or management systems, to establish connection admission parameters for multiple switches in a single management domain by configuring policy information and other data via a single centralized connection admission control point. Specifically, this document specifies the protocol between the switch Connection Control Entity (CCE) and the external FAS. Using LFAP, a Flow Admission Service can: allow or disallow flows, define the parameters under which a given flow is to operate (operating policy) or, redirect the flow to an alternate destination. The FAS may also maintain details of current or historical flows for billing, capacity planning and other purposes. A significant advantage of this protocol is that it relieves switch vendors from the complexity of policy enforcement under any number of policy representation schemes. Similarly, switch configuration managers do not need to translate organization-determined policy or usage procedures, limitations and guidelines into an arbitrarily large set of vendor-specific representations. Finally, use of such a scheme makes possible plug-and-play connection management at the present time - in the absence of a standardized representation for connection policies. This document describes the message flow between switch CCE and FAS, the messages used and error handling that applies. This constitutes the LFAP interface definition. Amsden, et. al. Informational
