Future Enhancements in Provisioning and Management

Several enhancements are possible to the configuration, provisioning, and management of MPLS networks. You can create cookie-cutter templates for some standard configurations for some simple deployments. For example, VPN configurations can be simplified if the requirement is always full-mesh connectivity between sites. Many vendors, including Cisco, also offer several management applications that can help manage MPLS services, including some complex computations that can help place TE LSPs explicitly and provide bandwidth guarantees in failure conditions.

Adaptive Self-Healing Networks

Failure detection is extremely important to make re-routing decisions and reconverge on a topology. With MPLS embedded management capabilities, both control and data plane liveliness can be monitored. The liveliness data can be combined with some intelligence in software to make the following:

• Fast reroute decisions

• Automatic invocation of a trace to find the location of fault

• Isolation of that fault by re-routing around that failure, using FRR or other mechanisms

This creates a powerful network paradigm that heals itself when it detects failures. A liveliness check of the LSPs and TE tunnels helps distinguish control plane from data plane failures. An automatic invocation of traces helps find the fault location in the network and, by changing routing metrics and re-routing of traffic, this can be achieved around the failure within a short timethereby creating the powerful notion of a self-healing network.