The MPLS WG Archive

[Alia Atlas <aatlas@avici.com>]

The idea is not to mandate how traffic distribution is done.  It's to say 
that the reserved labels should be excluded from consideration in 
determining that.  I'm certainly against anything which increases the size 
of the microflows which can be load-balanced - this doesn't do that, b/c 
only the OAM packets would have those reserved labels.

Which huge problems are you seeing with this?  I'm not saying that it 
should be mandated in anyway, simply that it may be superior design, if one 
chose to implement it thusly.

Absolutely, this isn't something to be required and it is revolutionary in 
that it requires hardware changes.  I don't see how it is a burden on 
existing and future implementations; it is a suggestion for how to make the 
ECMP friendlier.  Didn't we also have discussions about how routers should 
do microflow classification for the load-balancing instead of doing 
round-robin to avoid microflow reordering?  And that  is not what all 
routers do or, probably, will ever do depending on where in the network 
they are...

Alia

At 01:27 PM 11/19/2002 -0500, Thomas D. Nadeau wrote:

>>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
>
>Success is relative; the more success, the more relatives. -Anonymous
>
>