Thursday, May 13, 2010 11:00 am - 11:30 am
With the advancement of MPLS in the access, the need to provide multisegment PWs is becoming increasingly important to Service Providers. There are applications such as mobile backhaul that are also contributing to the growth of multisegment PWs as an important service offering for Service Providers. LDP is the predominant protocol used for setting up PWs for VWPS service. Use of LDP to offer multisegment PWs poses a few challenges. The hardest challenge is the provisioning due to lack of auto-discovery in LDP. This has been solved by use of BGP for auto-discovering PEs. However, in many applications the end PEs are low end devices that do not have the capability to support BGP. Another important issue with the use of LDP to set up PWs is control plane scaling. If there are N PEs that might need to set up PWs, there need to exist a full mesh of LDP sessions. This scales only for small networks. This presentation describes a solution that addresses both provisioning and scaling requirements for large scale deployment of multisegment PWs. The solution also accommodates the limitations of low end devices that might not support BGP. In addition, it reuses some of the best practices used for inter-AS services between different SPs.