Abstract:

Pseudowire emulation is a rapidly maturing technology with at least a dozen vendors now supporting interoperable implementations of Layer 2 tunneling over MPLS, and efforts are well underway to support similar services over IP-based encapsulations such as L2TPv3. A question of considerable interest now is how best to build richly connected (or "meshy") layer 2 VPNs. One option is simply to configure the appropriate set of pseudowires one by one, but there are now several proposals to automate the process of constructing a full mesh of pseudowires. This talk will examine some of the proposals on the table and will evaluate the relative merits of the different approaches, including the choice of signalling and discovery protocols. We will also consider the benefits and drawbacks of automated full mesh configuration versus provisioning of individual pseudowires for typical L2VPN scenarios.

Bruce Davie has worked at Cisco Systems, Inc. since 1995, and is a Cisco Fellow. He holds a B.E. from the University of Melbourne, Australia and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh. From 1988-1995 he worked at Bellcore on a variety of networking research projects. At Cisco he was part of the team that developed Tag Switching, a precursor of MPLS. He now leads a group working on the architecture and development of MPLS and quality of service capabilities for IP networks. He is the author of three books on networking, and an active participant in the IETF.