Team mixes MPLS and IPv6 for enterprising results

The iLabs Advanced Internetworking Initiative team in collaboration with Isocore Internetworking Lab this week will deploy a live, Multi-protocol Label Switching network to examine various MPLS VPN technologies, as well as some of the latest developments in IPv6/IPv4/MPLS integration. AII team members Hege Trovsik, Rajiv Papneja and Jim Martin took some time from their busy pre-show testing efforts last month to discuss their project with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy.

What are the overall/overriding objectives of your tests?

Papneja: The overall objective is to establish the availability of advanced enterprise applications across a capable, interoperable MPLS-based core. This years' demonstration is unique as it shows the readiness of the MPLS capability to support IPv6 customers without causing MPLS to be extended further, or the need to replace the IPv4-capable core routers in the existing service provider infrastructure. Also, this enables enterprise customers to move to IPv6 supported devices and still be transparently connected to same IPv4 infrastructure.

Are you testing MPLS's edge service capabilities? Or core transport capabilities? Or both?

Papneja: The focus will be primarily on the edge services and applications. The demonstration will include cases showing how various MPLS technologies can benefit the enterprise customers, and these customers can deploy their own services without much of overhead. For example, the demonstration will be showing different types of MPLS VPNs [Layer 2/Layer 3], IPv6 over MPLS and Multicast over MPLS. In addition, certain core features, such as Fast Reroute across a [quality of service]-aware and a traffic-engineered core, will be examined. Attendees will be able to experience edge services such as Layer 2 point-to-point and point-to-multipoint VPNs [including virtual private LAN service], Layer 3 VPNs based on IETF RFC 2547bis, Fast Reroute capable Label Switched Paths using [Resource Reservation Protocol-Traffic Engineering] Extensions, Multicast over MPLS, and IPv6 tunneling over MPLS.

Martin: Our work with IP Multicast in some ways builds on the MPLS core and in others is completely orthogonal to it. The MPLS related portion involves attempting to deploy IP Multicast over [Border Gateway Protocol]/VPNs - the [IETF] "Rosen draft" - which allows private multicast domains to transit a MPLS-enabled core, and preserve most, if not all, of the key advantages of multicast, like non-replication of streams over a given link.

We will contrast this with providing private Layer 2 VPNs and running existing multicast protocols directly on those paths, which inherently can lead to replication. This investigation is crucial as more enterprises use multicast as part of their business and need to interconnect far-flung sites.

During hot stage testing, we were able to get a single vendor's implementation to work at the provider edge, over a multi-vendor core. At the show, we intend to bring additional implementations into the mix at the edge and see how they interact. This is likely to be quite interesting, as the Rosen draft has one of the common pitfalls of modern standards: it specifies three possible sets of handling rules, with two different encapsulations. Thus with six different "draft-compliant" scenarios, interoperability is far from certain.