The MPLS WG Archive

["Thomas D. Nadeau" <tnadeau@cisco.com>]

>The concept of avoiding the reserved labels in an MPLS hash as a "best 
>way" makes some sense,


         Does this mean that we then have to mandate how IP (L2TPV3) does
traffic distribution too?  What is next?    I think that this solution looks
good in theory, but in practice there are huge problems with it.

>though it would probably only be gradually available as hardware changes.

         Kireeti or you made a good point that
this solution is not evolutionary; it is revolutionary as it will require
hardware changes.  On the surface it might sound reasonable to
say that well, hardware will evolve and as it does it must support
this sort of load-balancing. However, the fact of the matter is that
one size does not fit all in this case, and thus this will be a burden
on both existing and future implementations.

         --Tom

>Doing this would make OAM work for pseudo-wires, where there is no 
>underlying packet information which can be examined and where the TTL is fixed.
>
>But this does change fast-path hardware...
>
>Doing JUST that doesn't have bad impact on load-balancing of microflows 
>(or identifying as small a microflow as possible).
>
>Alia
>
>At 07:36 AM 11/19/2002 -0800, Shahram Davari wrote:
>>Hi,
>>
>>One of the criticism for this draft was that it is designed to overcome
>>Y.1711 limitation, in which a reserved label is used. As I mentioned
>>in the meeting the MPLS-Ping also requires usage of an extra reserved
>>label for non-IP carrying LSPs:
>>
>>   "To test an LSP that carries non-IP traffic, before injecting ICMP and
>>    MPLS ping messages into the LSP, the IPv4 Explicit NULL label should
>>    be prepended to such messages."
>>
>>So this draft is equally applicable to MPLS-ping.
>>
>>Yours,
>>Shahram
>

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