Guest Column

Fulfilling The Promise of MPLS: Ethernet Private Line Services Emerge as a First Killer App  (continued)

Next, with the core of their networks MPLS-enabled, service provider IP networks now have protocol and service transparency. Services designed to carry any type of traffic – protocol transparency – can be created and provisioned on edge routers without touching the core – service transparency. 

Emerging edge routing standards and technologies, such as Layer 2 transport over MPLS, described in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Draft Martini working document (IETF draft-martini-l2circuit-trans-mpls-06.txt), allow service providers to offer multiple services over MPLS, so that existing Frame Relay and ATM Layer 2 services can be moved onto the converged IP/MPLS backbone. This enables scaling of these profitable services beyond the capacity of the existing data service backbones, while reducing cost and complexity.

To effectively support multiple services over the MPLS backbone, the architecture of the network edge must go beyond traditional Internet routing to include new capabilities designed specifically to enable services. Like current generation Internet routers, edge routers must support Internet scale routing to tie into the existing IP backbone and learn the network topology and location of distant networks.  Scalable high-speed interfaces are necessary to aggregate customer traffic onto the IP/MPLS core   Edge routers must also deliver the bandwidth guarantees of ATM and Frame Relay services, which means they need to contain sophisticated traffic engineering and bandwidth management, including per-customer queues and traffic shaping. These capabilities are critical for Service Level Agreement (SLA) provisioning and monitoring.  Extensive accounting is required to bill for usage-based services.  And, the ability to rapidly provision services is more critical than ever in these competitive conditions. 

With this new architecture in place, service providers can turn their attention to delivering high-capacity, scalable services to sustain their business into the future. From a business perspective, the more easily a service provider can introduce and scale a particular service, the greater the return.

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