Instituto Tecnolgico de las Amricas

Nombre: Hugo A. Sanchez

Matricula: 2007-0012

Materia: Tecnologias WAN (CCNA 4)

Profesor(a): Wendy de la Rosa

Multiprotocol Label Switching

In 1996 a group from Ipsilon Networks proposed a "flow management protocol". Their "IP Switching" technology, which was defined only to work over ATM, did not achieve market dominance. Cisco Systems, introduced a related proposal, not restricted to ATM transmission, called "Tag Switching".[4] It was a Cisco proprietary proposal, and was renamed "Label Switching". It was handed over to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for open standardization. The IETF work involved proposals from other vendors, and development of a consensus protocol that combined features from several vendors' work. One original motivation was to allow the creation of simple high-speed switches, since for a significant length of time it was impossible to forward IP packets entirely in hardware. However, advances in VLSI have made such devices possible. Therefore the advantages of MPLS primarily revolve around the ability to support multiple service models and perform traffic management. MPLS also offers a robust recovery framework that goes beyond the simple protection rings of synchronous optical networking (SONET/SDH).

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a mechanism in high-performance telecommunications networks which directs and carries data from one network node to the next with the help of labels. MPLS makes it easy to create virtual links between distant nodes. It can encapsulate packets of various network protocols. MPLS is a highly scalable, protocol agnostic, data-carrying mechanism. In an MPLS network, data packets are assigned labels. Packet-forwarding decisions are made solely on the contents of this label, without the need to examine the packet itself. This allows one to create end-to-end circuits across any type of transport medium, using any protocol. The primary benefit is to eliminate dependence on a particular data link layer technology, such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Frame Relay, Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET) or Ethernet, and eliminate the need for multiple layer2 networks to satisfy different types of traffic. MPLS belongs to the family of packet-switched networks. MPLS operates at an OSI model layer that is generally considered to lie between traditional definitions of layer 2 (data link layer) and layer 3 (network layer), and thus is often referred to as a "layer 2.5" protocol. It was designed to provide a unified data-carrying service for both circuit-based clients and packetswitching clients which provide a datagram service model. It can be used to carry many different kinds of traffic, including IP packets, as well as native ATM, SONET, and Ethernet frames.

A number of different technologies were previously deployed with essentially identical goals, such as Frame Relay and ATM. MPLS technologies have evolved with the strengths and weaknesses of ATM in mind. Many network engineers agree that ATM should be replaced with a protocol that requires less overhead, while providing connection-oriented services for variable-length frames. MPLS is currently replacing some of these technologies in the marketplace. It is highly possible that MPLS will completely replace these technologies in the future, thus aligning these technologies with current and future technology needs. In particular, MPLS dispenses with the cell-switching and signaling-protocol baggage of ATM. MPLS recognizes that small ATM cells are not needed in the core of modern networks, since modern optical networks (as of 2008) are so fast (at 40 Gbit/s and beyond) that even full-length 1500 byte packets do not incur significant real-time queuing delays (the need to reduce such delays e.g., to support voice traffic was the motivation for the cell nature of ATM). At the same time, MPLS attempts to preserve the traffic engineering and out-of-band control that made frame relay and ATM attractive for deploying large-scale networks. While the traffic management benefits of migrating to MPLS are quite valuable (better reliability, increased performance), there is a significant loss of visibility and access into the MPLS cloud for IT departments MPLS works by prefixing packets with an MPLS header, containing one or more labels. This is called a label stack. Each label stack entry contains four fields:

A 20-bit label value. a 3-bit Traffic Class field for QoS (quality of service) priority (experimental) and ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification). a 1-bit bottom of stack flag. If this is set, it signifies that the current label is the last in the stack. an 8-bit TTL (time to live) field.

These MPLS-labeled packets are switched after a label lookup/switch instead of a lookup into the IP table. As mentioned above, when MPLS was conceived, label lookup and label switching were faster than a routing table or RIB (Routing Information Base) lookup because they could take place directly within the switched fabric and not the CPU. Routers that perform routing based only on the label are called label switch routers (LSRs). The entry and exit points of an MPLS network are called label edge routers (LERs), which, respectively, push an MPLS label onto an incoming packet[note 1] and pop it off the outgoing packet. Alternatively, under penultimate hop popping this function may instead be performed by the LSR directly connected to the LER.

There are two standardized protocols for managing MPLS paths: the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) and RSVP-TE, an extension of the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) for traffic engineering. Furthermore, there exist extensions of the BGP protocol that can be used to manage an MPLS path. An MPLS header does not identify the type of data carried inside the MPLS path. If one wants to carry two different types of traffic between the same two routers, with different treatment by the core routers for each type, one has to establish a separate MPLS path for each type of traffic.

Metro Ethernet
A Metro Ethernet is a computer network that covers a metropolitan area and that is based on the Ethernet standard. It is commonly used as a metropolitan access network to connect subscribers and businesses to a larger service network or the Internet. Businesses can also use Metro Ethernet to connect branch offices to their Intranet. Ethernet has been a well known technology for decades. An Ethernet interface is much less expensive than a SONET/SDH or PDH interface of the same bandwidth. Ethernet also supports high bandwidths with fine granularity,[clarification needed] which is not available with traditional SDH connections. Another distinct advantage of an Ethernet-based access network is that it can be easily connected to the customer network, due to the prevalent use of Ethernet in corporate and, more recently, residential networks. Therefore, bringing Ethernet in to the Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) introduces a lot of advantages to both the service provider and the customer (corporate and residential).

A typical service provider Metro Ethernet network is a collection of Layer 2 or/and Layer 3 switches or/and routers connected through optical fiber. The topology could be a ring, hub-andspoke (star), or full or partial mesh. The network will also have a hierarchy: core, distribution (aggregation) and access. The core in most cases is an existing IP/MPLS backbone, but may migrate to newer forms of Ethernet Transport in the form of 10Gbit/s, 40Gbit/s or 100Gbit/s speeds. Ethernet on the MAN can be used as pure Ethernet, Ethernet over SDH, Ethernet over MPLS or Ethernet over DWDM. Pure Ethernet-based deployments are cheap but less reliable and scalable, and thus are usually limited to small scale or experimental deployments. SDH-based deployments are useful when there is an existing SDH infrastructure already in place, its main shortcoming being the loss of flexibility in bandwidth management due to the rigid hierarchy imposed by the SDH network. MPLS based deployments are costly but highly reliable and scalable, and are typically used by large service providers.

A comparison of MPLS-based Metro Ethernet against a pure Ethernet MAN:

Scalability: In a properly designed Ethernet VLAN network, each switched path can have 4094 single tag VLANs. Some aggregation and core switches can classify traffic by two VLANs using IEEE 802.1ad VLAN stacking, so with such aggregation devices properly placed in the center of a network, end segments and rings of single tag devices can receive only the traffic that they need. When using MPLS, Ethernet VLANs have local meaning only (like Frame Relay PVC). Same scalability considerations apply to the MAC addresses where in a pure Layer 2 Ethernet MAN all MAC addresses are being shared across the network, although this issue can be managed by smart network design and choosing switches with MAC tables sufficient for the size of network segments.

Resiliency: pure Ethernet network resiliency relies on Spanning Tree Protocols STP, IEEE 802.1w RSTP or IEEE 802.1s MSTP (30 to sub 50ms sec convergence depending on network design) while MPLS-based MANs use mechanisms such as MPLS Fast Reroute to achieve SDH-like (50 msecs) convergence times. Metro Ethernet can also utilise Link aggregation or Resilient Packet Ring where appropriate to add link redundancy and recovery in distribution networks. Some Ethernet vendors' RSTP convergence is also sub-50ms, but this convergence time may vary from vendor to vendor. Ethernet protection switching is also standardised in (ITU G.8031).

Multiprotocol convergence: with the maturity on pseudowires standards (ATM Virtual Leased Line VLL, FR VLL, etc.) an MPLS-based Metro Ethernet can backhaul IP/Ethernet traffic together with virtually any type of traffic coming from customer or other access networks (i.e. ATM aggregation for UMTS or TDM aggregation for GSM), while this could be more challenging in a pure Ethernet scenario.

End to End OAM: MPLS-based MAN offers a wide set of troubleshooting and OAM MPLS-based tools which enrich Service Providers ability to effectively troubleshoot and diagnose network problems. These include for example, MAC ping, MAC traceroute, LSP ping etc. However there are now Ethernet OAM tools defined in IEEE 802.1ab]], IEEE 802.1ag[2] andEthernet in the First Mile (IEEE 802.3ah[3]) for monitoring and troubleshooting Ethernet networks. EOAM (Ethernet Operations, Administration, and Maintenance) is a protocol for installing, monitoring, and troubleshooting MANs and WANs.

Familiar network domains are likely to exist regardless of the transport technology chosen to implement Metro Area Networks: Access, Aggregation/Distribution, Metro, and Core.[1]

Access devices normally exist at a customer's premises, unit, or wireless base station. This is the network that connects customer equipment, and may include ONT and/or Residential gateway, or office router.

Aggregation occurs on a distribution network such as an ODN segment. Often Passive Optical Network or Digital Subscriber Line technologies are employed, but some using point-to-point Ethernet over "home-run" direct fibre. This part of the network includes nodes such as Multi Tenanted Unit switches, Optical line terminals in an outside plant or central officecabinet, Ethernet in the First Mile equipment, or provider bridges. A Metro Area Network may include transport technologies MPLS, PBB-TE and T-MPLS, each with its own resiliency and management solutions. A Core Network often uses IP-MPLS to connect different Metro networks together.

Much of the functionality of Metro Ethernet such as Virtual Private Line or Virtual Private LAN is implemented by the use of Ethernet VLAN tags that allow differentiation of each part of the network. Logical differentiation of the physical network helps to identify the rights that the traffic has and to ease the management of hosts' access rights with respect to other users and networks. A pure Ethernet MAN uses only layer 2 switches for all of its internal structure. This allows for a very simple and cheap design, and also for a relatively simple initial configuration. The original Ethernet technology was not well suited for service provider applications; as a shared-media network, it was impossible to keep traffic isolated, which made implementation of private circuits impossible. Ethernet MANs became feasible in the late 90s due to the development of new techniques to allow transparent tunneling of traffic through the use of Virtual LANs as "point to point" or "multipoint to multipoint" circuits. Combined with new features such as VLAN Stacking (also known as VLAN Tunneling), and VLAN Translation, it became possible to isolate the customers' traffic from each other and from the core network internal signaling traffic. However, Ethernet is constantly evolving and has now carrier class features with the recent addition of IEEE 802.1ad (Provider Bridges)(also known as QinQ or stacked VLANs) and IEEE 802.1ah (Provider Backbone Bridges) (also known as MAC in MAC or PBB) and IEEE 802.1Qay (Provider Backbone Transport) (also known as PBT or PBB-TE). Spanning-tree, broadcast packets and dynamic MAC learning are disabled and sub 50ms failover features are introduced.