The Cisco ASR 9000 Series operates in a fully distributed fashion, meaning that all packet-forwarding decisions and actions take place on each individual line card. The Cisco ASR 9000 Series line cards provide a flexible programming infrastructure with high-density hierarchical quality-of-service (H-QoS) services, security, and integrated Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE). The distributed nature of the Cisco ASR 9000 Series also presents itself in the control plane. The distributed control plane facilitates scale in features such as Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) and Ethernet operations, administration, and management (EOAM), which improve resilience and provide comprehensive instrumentation.