Implementation of hardware agnostic fast path packet processing

The core functionality of a network is packet processing. Fast Path is the functional area that handles processing of packets. The Fast Path functionalities is predominantly hardware driven and is very difficult to port on other platforms. This is because the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) used for developing fast path applications is system on chip specific. To enable the easy migration of fast path applications across hardware requires a harmonized API set. Open data Plane (ODP) is open source initiative in this direction. The Fast Path packet processing can be implemented using Open Data Plane (ODP) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to achieve hardware or platform independence.