Patent ID: 11895024
Assignee: NOKIA TECHNOLOGIES OY
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 6:
7. A method of delivering packets, comprising:
forwarding, from a second Virtual Network Function Component, VNFC to a virtual switch, a data-plane packet for a terminal device, the packet being targeted to an external communication peer and including a network address of a first VNFC as a destination address, the first VNFC performing a predetermined transport processing of the packet and forwarding the processed packet to the virtual switch, the second VNFC serving the terminal device and including at least one data-plane application, the second VNFC separated from the first VNFC;
delivering the packet from the virtual switch to the first VNFC based on a mapping between an identity of the terminal device and an identity of the second VNFC;
in response to receipt of, at the first VNFC, a control-plane packet for the terminal device, determining whether a destination address in the control-plane packet matches a preconfigured address; and
in response to the destination address in the control-plane packet matching the preconfigured address, delivering the control-plane packet to a kernel protocol stack of an operating system running on a single server,
wherein the first VNFC and the virtual switch are implemented on the single server, a first memory area on the single server is allocated to the first VNFC, a second memory area on the single server is allocated to the virtual switch, and the first memory area is isolated from the second memory area, and
wherein forwarding the processed packet from the first VNFC to the virtual switch comprises causing the processed packet in the first memory area to be accessed by the virtual switch via an address offset adjustment of the second memory area.