| CPC H04L 41/0809 (2013.01) [H04L 47/122 (2013.01)] | 20 Claims |
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1. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having stored thereon instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a network element, cause the network element to:
receive, from a network controller, a packet pipeline program for a programmable packet pipeline of the network element, wherein the packet pipeline program includes instructions to detect one or more offload conditions;
receive, from the network controller, one or more identifiers, each of the one or more identifiers corresponding to one of one or more packet processing plug-ins, each of the one or more packet processing plug-ins corresponding to one of the one or more offload conditions, the identifiers defining one of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), a path name for a file, an index of a file, or a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) associated with a file,
download, for execution on the network element, the one or more packet processing plug-ins;
receive, by the network element, a network packet;
process the network packet by the programmable packet pipeline; and
in response to the programmable packet pipeline detecting an offload condition while processing the network packet, transferring, by the programmable packet pipeline, the network packet to the packet processing plug-in corresponding to the offload condition, wherein the packet processing plug-in locally executes packet-level modifications autonomously based on pre-stored processing logic without communication or coordination with a separate control plane of management processor of the network element.
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