A Note About Standards

In the above discussion, we have used two of the IETF MPLS MIBs to illustrate the use of LSPs, tunnels, and their associated objects. An important point to note about standards in general is that they are detailed specifications that form engineering guidelines for implementers. If all vendors implement their MPLS products to conform to the standards, then the reward should be interoperability and uniformity of features in deployed technology. Mature standards such as IEEE 802.3 and ATM (though there are proprietary variants of the ATM control plane) provide a good example of the power of standards to produce interoperable NEs. The same can possibly be said for many of the SS7 protocol standards (though there are national variants of these). Let's hope MPLS proves to be both interoperable and generally easy to use.

The great merit of standard MIBs is that the network management software required to manipulate them need not change as new NEs are added. This facilitates ease of development of management solutions and potentially far fewer incompatibility problems in production networks.