History of VPLS at IETF Ali Sajassi November 12, 2002

VPLS – Virtual Private LAN Services Providing a bridged LAN service among different CEs/sites of each customer End-to-end service is an (Emulated) Bridged LAN service (Bridging + Emulated LAN) Dividing it such that IETF takes care of Emulated LAN portion of it and IEEE takes care of Bridging portion of it

VPLS System PE Service Provider Backbone PE VPLS-A -B -B -A Emulated LAN CE Bridged LAN

VPLS System w/ Distributed-PE PE Service Provider Backbone PE N-PE VPLS-A -A -B -A CE U-PE VPLS-B -B -B CE Access Network U-PE

VPLS Components Logical Components for a VPLS Reference Architecture 1. Attachment VCs 2. Pseudo Wires 3. PSN Tunnels 4. Auto Discovery 5. Auto Configuration 6. Virtual Switch Instance

VPLS System – An Example

VPLS Evolution Got started w/ draft-lasserre-tls-mpls-00.txt about 15 months ago Soon after there was a draft-vkompella to address signaling aspects for MAC address learning and withdrawal After that the following drafts were issued to address system scalability in terms of PWs and its associated signaling Logical PE Distributed TLS Hierarchical VPLS VPLS (Distributed) Architectures

VPLS Evolution - Continue Then there was consolidation among number of drafts Next there was a quite period And now There is a new set of solutions

VPLS Evolution - Continue During Consolidation phase, the following drafts got merged together draft-lasserre got first merged with draft- vkompella the resultant draft got merged with draft- khandekar the resultant draft got merged with draft- sajassi

VPLS Evolution - Continue The first generation of drafts were based on PtP PWs New drafts try to address two areas: MAC address reduction in the access network using MAC-in-MAC PWs reduction in the core using MPtP PWs and more efficient forwarding in the Egress PE

New Solutions on VPLS Two categories of drafts Category 1: MAC-in-MAC encapsulation E-HVPLS VHLS Category 2: Use of MP2P & MP2MP PWs IPLS MVPLS GVPLS

E-HVPLS – Enhanced HVPLS SP Assigns a MAC address to each Attachment Circuit on U-PE and N-PE All customer Ethernet frames over that AC gets encapsulated using the assigned MAC address

VHLS – Virtual Hierarchical LAN Services Same as E-HVPLS except it assigns a MAC address to a U-PE instead of an AC of the U- PE It used a VPN-id to uniquely identify a VPLS instance since Forwarding table is keyed using MAC + VPN- id (9 bytes) All customer Ethernet frames from the U-PE gets encapsulated using the assigned MAC address and VPN-id

IPLS – IP LAN Services A VPLS type solution optimized for IP routers as CEs Forwarding is done in data plane Learning is done in control plane (using proxy ARP) Forwarding is asymmetric (uses MAC addresses in ingress PE but not egress PE) thus more efficient A MP2P PW (MPLS label) is used for each attached CE A MP2MP PW (a set of labels) is used for multicast/broadcast Packet replication for MP2MP PW is done at the N-PE

MPVLS – VPLS based on IP Multicast Forwarding and learning are done in data plane Forwarding is asymmetric (uses MAC addresses in ingress PE but not egress PE) thus more efficient A MP2P PW (IP address) is used for each Attachment Circuit (not attached CE) A MP2MP PW is used for multicast/broadcast and unknown unicast frames One multicast group is used per VPLS instance Packet replication for MP2MP PW is distributed over the core

GPVLS – Generic VPLS Forwarding and learning are done in data plane Forwarding can be both symmetric and asymmetric A MP2P PW (MPLS Label) is used for each Attachment Circuit or each VPLS instance at the egress PE A MP2MP PW is used for multicast/broadcast and unknown unicast frames Packet replication for MP2MP PW is done at the N-PE