Abstract:

The team at Isocore was the first, per support from UUNET, to present a new concept of MPLS interoperability testing to industry in the late 90's. The concept was backed by a number of major vendors and the first MPLS RSVP and LDP testing was demonstrated in 2000. Some of the results were presented to public at MPLS 2000 and live interoperability tests were conducted following the conference for vendors' guests, comprising of service providers and large enterprise networks.

Since then, Isocore has continued with its high impact leading-edge code testing and has helped vendors to demonstrate new MPLS features for use by service providers and private networks. During the testing periods, open areas in protocols have been identified and interoperability issues have been discovered. Various recommendations have been provided to the participating vendors through their technical advisory committee representatives and subsequently reported to IETF working groups.

In this presentation, we will review some of the recent interoperability activities taken place in the Internetworking Lab of Isocore, and solutions proposed to problems observed during the testing. We will put in perspective technical solutions provided in certain areas by planned MPLS capabilities. We will further discuss the important features to be demonstrated during the third MPLS Public Demo following MPLS 2002.