The MPLS WG Archive

[Bora Akyol <akyol@pluris.com>]

George, Yakov, et al.,

I do not think that this internet draft should be adopted as an MPLS
working group document. My primary objection to this document is the fact
that bundling of L1/L2 interfaces has nothing specific to do with MPLS.
In fact, this is an L2 abstraction that should be completely transparent
to MPLS, IP or ISIS. I feel that this particular draft is very focused on
MPLS-specific concerns and does not provide a good abstraction of the L2
bundling aspects and also places significant restrictions on what can be
done with a bundled link and what kind of members it can have.

I personally know of at least one implementation (ours) of bundled links
that forms such an abstraction to all upper layer protocols. In this
implementation, a heterogeneous group of L1/L2 interfaces are bonded
together at L2 NCP layer such that IP NCP, MPLS NCP, ISIS NCP treats the
bundled (bonded) interface as just another type of interface. When MPLS
RSVP messages are passed over the bundled interface, the labels that are
assigned are programmed into all members of the bundled links even though
in reality a hash is used so that only one of the members are used (to
prevent reordering). Bandwidth management is handled by means of the
apriori knowledge of the hash. Also note that this particular
implementation is not MLPPP since no additional headers are added to the
packets.
For MPLS specific concerns, the methods that are used in this approach
can be expanded. For IP, this particular approach works very well.

If there is interest from the MPLS WG, we (myself and another colleague)
would be perfectly willing to author an Internet Draft on this particular
bond implementation. The question that I have is what is the proper forum
to submit a generalized layer 2 bundling draft in the IETF. It is
certainly relevant to MPLS, but it is just as relevant to IP, ISIS, etc.

Regards

Bora Akyol


George Swallow wrote:

> > Folks,
> >
> > Kireeti and myself would like to ask the MPLS WG to
> > accept draft-kompella-mpls-bundle-01.txt as an
> > MPLS WG document.
> >
> > Yakov.
>
> Consensus on this will be assessed on 7/12.  Opinions should be aired
> by then.
>
> ...George
>
> ==================================================================
> George Swallow       Cisco Systems                   (978) 244-8143
>                      250 Apollo Drive
>                      Chelmsford, Ma 01824