Foreword


In 1996, Cisco took a dramatic step at the IETF in requesting a BOF to discuss standardizing tag switching. Tag switching is a technology that was pioneered by Cisco to establish a common control plane across IP and ATM networks. That same year, Cisco shipped the first implementation of tag switching in software release 12.0(1)A.

In less than a decade, tag switching, or as it later became known through the standardization process, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), has become a leading technology for IP-enabled services. More than 250 service providers around the globe have delivered services based on the robust Cisco MPLS roadmap, and a growing number of enterprises are also deploying MPLS to meet internal IT demands.

Why is MPLS such a driving force in the industry? The attributes of MPLS enable customers to easily separate customer or user traffic through a label (or tagging mechanism) much like the postal service forwards mail with a postal or zip code rather than the full address. Separating traffic based on labels lends itself to a virtual private network (VPN) service. Furthermore, MPLS allows providers to direct or reroute traffic through the Cisco traffic-engineering mechanisms. Providers can differentiate services through quality of service (QoS), delivering a gold, silver, and bronze offering. MPLS is now advancing to meet increasing requirements for voice- and video-based services and supporting interconnections across service provider domains to reach new markets or meet multinational customer sites. Ultimately, MPLS is evolving to enable a converged packet network that allows providers to migrate existing Layer 2 services and their IP-based services across a robust common infrastructure.

The concept of MPLS is also extended to General MPLS or GMPLS for IP + Optical requirements to deliver dynamic bandwidth allocation.

Here are just a few examples of the impact MPLS has on the industry:

  • In 1999, British Telecom Global Services launched BT MPLS to deliver global multipoint, data, voice, and video network services that prioritize and support any mix of IP applications. BT MPLS offers comprehensive Service Level Agreements that cover delivery, availability, and network performance.

  • Equant IP-VPN service offers five distinct classes of service for their MPLS VPN service with each class tied to particular applications. Equant allows customers to monitor their network services through a web interface.

  • Infonet offers an IP VPN Secure product delivered over their MPLS-based private IP infrastructure. The service offers five or more classes of service targeted to multinational corporations in the pharmaceuticals, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, and chemical segments. Infonet has engineered voice, video, and data class separately.

  • Bell Canada and St. Joseph's Healthcare partnered to deliver a telerobotics-assisted surgery over Bell Canada's VPN enterprise service to provide healthcare services in remote regions of Canada.

  • The authors of this book, Monique Morrow and Azhar Sayeed, have been at the forefront of the MPLS technology revolution. They collectively have 35 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, and they have worked with service providers and enterprises around the globe to guide their service definitions and assist with their network designs. They both have hands-on, practical experience at the business and engineering levels. They have shaped the Cisco product portfolio, identifying new capabilities to meet increasing customer requirements for new applications, higher availability, and better operational controls.

We hope that this book will help you realize the business opportunity from MPLS-based services.


Susan E. Scheer, vice president of engineering
Cisco Systems, Inc.




MPLS and Next-Generation Networks(c) Foundations for NGN and Enterprise Virtualization
MPLS and Next-Generation Networks: Foundations for NGN and Enterprise Virtualization
ISBN: 1587201208
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 162

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