MPLS has been a great success in service provider IP-based core networks, using such capabilities as traffic engineering, fast reroute, and signaling resilience over failures to greatly improve their operational characteristics when compared to traditional hop-by-hop IP without MPLS. In addition, it has served as a basis for new applications, such as Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs and VPLS, and enabled service providers to converge multiple services onto a single IP/MPLS-based core network.

However, for the most part, MPLS deployments have been restricted to date to be restricted to single-provider (and single-AS) core networks. This talk will discuss recent work in the IETF, ITU-T, and MPLS/FR Alliance to enable MPLS to go beyond the single provider edge, including such items as:

• Inter-AS MPLS signaling
• Inter-Provider MPLS signaling
• LSP Stitching
• MPLS User-to-Network Interface
• MPLS UNI QoS Proxy Admission Control
• MPLS/PNNI Signaling Service Interworking
• Point-to-Multipoint MPLS

Andrew G. Malis holds the position of Research Fellow at Tellabs, which provides end-to-end service delivery and transport solutions for carriers. He has been active in wide-area data networking and telecommunications for over 28 years, beginning with the ARPANET, the foundation of today's Internet. He has also held senior engineering positions at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman; Ascom Nexion; Cascade Communications; Ascend Communications; Lucent Technologies; and Vivace Networks, which was purchased by Tellabs. His current responsibilities include Tellabs? product architecture, future product planning, standards participation coordination, and customer consultation.

He is also President and Chairman of the Board of the MPLS/Frame Relay Alliance, served as the MPLS Forum?s founding Technical Committee Chair, has chaired a number of working groups in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the ATM Forum, and is a veteran participant and award recipient in other standards bodies and industry consortia. He has written, edited, and otherwise contributed to many standards documents in these organizations, including 21 IETF RFCs. He also serves on the technical advisory boards of several privately held high-tech companies, and has chaired and spoken at numerous industry conferences. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Brown University, and his Master of Science degree, also in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, at Harvard University.