APNIC 29 APRICOT 2010 Banner

100 Gigabit and Beyond: Increasing Capacity in IP/MPLS Networks Today

Presented by Greg Hankins (Brocade)  [bio]

Service Providers and backhaul carriers are increasingly using link bundling to address the growing demand for IP and MPLS services.

While 100GE is in the standardization process, the bandwidth demand is continuously growing and link capacities already exceeds 100Gbps in many cases.

Operators use several Equal Cost Multi-Path techniques at various protocol layers such as BGP, OSPF, ISIS, RSVP-TE and LDP to provide multiple paths. With the availability of various combinations of load balanced paths at different layers (IP, MPLS, Ethernet), and a variety in service offerings that include native IP, L2VPNs, VPLS, L3VPNs, IPv6, a one size fits all approach for load balancing does not exist.

This presentation provides load-sharing options at various network layers, highlights the criteria used for load sharing at each layer and provides recommendation on the best schemes for each traffic type to boost network capacity utilization. It also provides innovative techniques of speculation in MPLS packets and neutralization of polarization effects in IP networks.