US Patent 6999454 Information routing system and apparatus

An information routing system and apparatus includes separate control and forwarding planes. The control plane is split into box management control functions and routing control functions. The box management control functions are isolated to a single processing card, while the routing control functions are distributed across multiple processing cards. The routing table is also distributed across multiple processing cards. The multiple processing cards are interconnected via a high-speed backplane bus for control plane traffic and by a fabric for forwarding plane traffic.