MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies

by Ina Minei, Julian Lucek

""Here at last is a single, all-encompassing resource where the myriad applications sharpen into a comprehensible text."" Kireeti Kompella, Juniper Fellow, Juniper Networks. The authoritative guide to MPLS, now in its second edition, fully updated with brand new material!

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is now considered the networking technology for carrying all types of network traffic, including voice telephony, real-time video, and data traffic. In "MPLS-Enabled Applications, the Second Edition, " the authors methodically show how MPLS holds the key to network convergence by allowing operators to offer more services over a single physical infrastructure. The Second Edition contains more than 150 illustrations, new chapters, and more coverage, guiding the reader from the basics of the technology, including signaling protocols, traffic engineering and fast reroute, though all its major applications.

"MPLS Enabled-Applications, Second Edition," contains comprehensive up-to-date coverage of: the current status and the future potential of all major MPLS applications, including L3VPNs (Layer 3 Virtual Private Networks), L2VPNs (Layer 2 Virtual Private Networks), pseudowires and VPLS . (Virtual Private LAN Service). extensive discussion of multicast support over MPLS, including a new chapter dedicated to multicast in VPNs, explaining both the PIM/GRE (Protocol Independent Multicast / Generic Routing Encapsulation) and the next generation BGP/MPLS solutions, new material on support of multicast in VPLS, a much-expanded chapter on MPLS multicast and a section perations and management (OAM) tools for point-to-multipoint LSPs. a new chapter on MPLS in access networks, as well as coverage of the use of MPLS in mobile and data communication networks. interoperation of LDP(Label Distribution Protocol) and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) based VPLS. comprehensive coverage of the base technology, as well as the latest IETF drafts

With a foreword by Yakov Rekhter

Genres: Technical

497 pages, ebook

First published October 7, 2005

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I dabble in MPLS design and troubleshooting, but I didn't have much theoretical understanding of the reasons why MPLS networks were built the way they were. MPLS-enabled applications came to my attention when I was trying to figure out how point-to-multipoint LSPs would work in the context of IP multicast packet delivery, and it certainly delivered a solid theoretical basis for them.

I was surprised at how strongly the authors come down in favor of RSVP - LDP really comes across as an ugly hack. I was also surprised that while the book had lots of mentions of "some vendors do X and some do y", it didn't say which vendors did which, nor did it discuss the practical maturity of the respective approaches. While the RSVP bias makes sense the way they present it (it certainly comes across as a lot more powerful - LDP's only advantage that comes across is simplicity and IGP synchronization, while RSVP has TE and FRR capabilities. It would have been great to have seen "the rsvp implementation in JunOS works the way we discussed for the last N years, and Cisco introduced in in XR versions blah blah blah" or vice versa. Examples of configuration snippets in JunOS, IOS, IOS-XR or others would have been tremendously useful, and it is unfortunate that those were not included.

They also come down strongly in favor of the route-reflector+BGP autodiscovery approach to vpn signaling, and the force of their argument is very strong - it changes the work involved with configuration and deployment of a new PE, feature, or VPN from O(N^2) to O(N) - that is, a new PE only needs the RR configuration to be updated, instead of requiring that every other PE also be configured.

All in all, this was a great book on MPLS theory, but without much practical implementation detail.

[Bartek Krawczyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This plus MPLS Fundamentals from Cisco Press and you'll be a MPLS expert.