In the telecom world, while there’s a lot of buzz around SRv6 and the hype surrounding AI, many service providers still rely heavily on the tried-and-true MPLS with LDP or RSVP tunnels. At ITcare, we’ve seen firsthand the challenges and rewards of these technologies.
Recently, we tackled a use case with one of our customers who was using static RSVP tunnels. RSVP tunnels, while effective, come with their own set of challenges:
- It requires a lot of manual work to build static tunnels.
- A full mesh of static tunnels is required.
- Every time a new PE is added to the network, it requires changes on all other PEs to build the tunnels.
- Scaling the network can become cumbersome and error-prone.
- Static tunnels lack the flexibility to dynamically adapt to network changes or failures.
Migrating to a pure LDP MPLS network wasn’t a viable solution because multiple sites had unequal paths, requiring load balancing across all paths. To address this, we implemented a solution incorporating LDP tunneling over RSVP for sites with equal cost paths.
MPLS RSVP Tunnel configuration with Static Path:
LDP tunneled neighbor information:
Inet.3 routing table output:
Please don’t judge on the hostnames using the hardware type in the naming, this is the convention that customer requested to follow. Although this is not a good approach, but, we were unable to convince customer to change it 🙂.
This approach provided numerous benefits for our customer:
- Simplified Network Configuration: LDP tunneling over RSVP reduces the manual configuration required for static tunnels, making network management more straightforward.
- Scalability: Adding new PEs becomes easier, as the need for configuring static RSVP tunnels on all other PEs is eliminated.
- Enhanced Load Balancing: The solution supports load balancing over equal cost paths, ensuring optimal use of network resources.
- Resilience and Flexibility: By leveraging RSVP for the underlying transport and LDP for signaling, the network can dynamically adapt to changes and failures, improving overall resilience.
- Operational Efficiency: Reduced manual intervention and automated tunnel setup translate to lower operational costs and fewer errors.
- Improved Performance: The combination of LDP and RSVP enables more efficient use of network bandwidth and better traffic engineering capabilities.
At ITcare, we are committed to providing innovative and practical solutions that enhance network performance and reliability. Our experience with LDP tunneling over RSVP demonstrates that even with traditional MPLS, there’s room for innovation and improvement.
#Telecom #MPLS #LDP #RSVP #NetworkEngineering #ITcare #Network Design