RFC 2124 (rfc2124) - Page 2 of 21

Cabletron's Light-weight Flow Admission Protocol Specification Version 1

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