Another day, another pile of great information.  I am still trying to sort through it all.  Today’s topics were MPLS-TP, Multicast, Mobility, and Experience.

The MPLS-TP section was kicked off by Loa Andersson from Ericsson.  He gave a standards update and discussed how the MPLS-TP specifications are actually being worked through quite quickly. He estimated that if there are no drastic changes, the specs should be completed mid-2011.

Luyuan Fang from cisco gave us some more justification for why we need MPLS-TP.   She is my new idol…she’s a great presenter, very knowledgeable, and she’s a nice person  – I wish she was giving all the sessions.  Some of the key points she made:  the reason for MPLS-TP is that is works with existing MPLS which leverages expertise and technologies; it provides a packet-based transport with features similar to existing circuit-based transport.  She also described some of the applications where MPLS-TP can be used. 

The next set of sessions were concerning multicast, but unfortunately they were more focused on the path computations used for multicast.  It has been a while since I have felt this dumb, but the terms and acronyms the presenters were tossing around went right over my head most of the time.  I am sure someone cares about how the best path and backup paths are computed, but it’s not me.  Just give me the output and show me what the network does with it.  Sorry…

The afternoon started with the extremely hot topic of mobility.  The speakers took different approaches to their sessions which made it more interesting.  One of the most interesting topics that I thought would be the biggest bore was the discussion on timing requirements for the mobile base stations.  Peter Roberts from Alcatel-Lucent did a great job with this session.  I never realized just how big a challenge this is, because not only do we need bit synchronization, but in the wireless world you need phase synchronization and time-of-day.  He explained the challenges that are being overcome with timing over packet – one of the biggest is having symmetric delays. 

Other discussions centered around Ethernet vs. MPLS-TP in the backhaul.   Pasula Reddy from Fujitsu spoke about the different motivations of the mobile provider and the backhaul provider (assuming they are not the same organization.  Esmael Dinan from Clearwire discussed their implementation for backhaul and some of the other options.  They are using microwave for their LTE implementation and straight Ethernet backhaul to an MPLS core.  The other option of course is running MPLS-TP across the backhaul network.  He said that because their microwave equipment supported native Ethernet, this was the most cost effective choice for their implementation.

The second part of the afternoon featured speakers from the providers who have real-world experience testing and implementing this.  Deutsche Telecom and Reliance Globalcom explained their strategies and implementations, then cisco gave a presentation on VPN services over DOCSIS.

The wrap up for the day was a vendor panel moderated by Dave McDysan from Verizon.  Representatives from Brocade, Cisco, Juniper, Ericsson, ALU, and IPInfusion all participated and answered questions on technology trends, standards compliance, and interoperability issues.

Another great day.  One more day then I will have a whole year to digest this stuff until 2010.

While this is day 2 of the conference, it is really the start of the general sessions so the kickoff was this morning.  The themes today were MPLS-TP, Seemless and Scalable MPLS, and High Availablity MPLS  with a little bit of cloud computing and SAN services thrown into the mix.  

 The keynote speech was given by Raymond Zhang from BT on the topic of cloud computing.  He asked the question:  “what if 90% of customer applications were in the network?”  How would we handle it?  He also made a comment that made me chuckle a little.  He said that in the networks we build the infrastructure to treat faults as exceptions, but software is written to deal with faults as the norm. HA!  I’m guessing he must be a windows user.

Next up was Yakov Rekhter from Juniper to discuss Local protection for LSP tail end node failure.  Yakov was informative as usual, and had excellent answers to the problem of “what happens when the end node (PE) fails?”  We have all kinds of mechanisms to deal with failures in the middle of the network, but that last node is the bugger that will kill the service if it dies.  One key point he made was that High Availability (HA) can NOT depend on routing convergence.  It must be independent.  The only way for HA MPLS networks is for fast recovery.   

He re-introduced the concept of LSP hierarchy (which I heard about at this conference a couple years ago) and stated that connectivity recovery options must support this concept of hierarchy.  So if the PE fails, the next hop P is the Point of Local Repair (PLR), and it must redirect traffic to a different PE.  The recovery PE must know what labels the original PE assigned, so it must have a different LFIB that is a mirror image of the primary.  He called this a “context-specific” LFIB.

Kireeti Kompella from Juniper was next and gave his talk on scaling MPLS to 100,000 nodes.  Many of his slides were the same as yesterday discussing the connectivity blueprint and the new terminology of Access Nodes, Service Nodes, etc.  His 2 talks were definitely related.  If MPLS pushes further out into the access network, then it has to scale.  His examples were MPLS to the DSLAM and MPLS to the cell site.  Think about how many cell sites there are and it automatically hits you that we have a scalability concern.

Nicolai Leymann from Deutsche Telecom was the service provider sanity check on this whole concept of scalability and seemless MPLS.  They are doing MPLS in the access and pseudowires from AN to the SN.  He said that the key is to separate services from transport, and in doing so you can move the services anywhere they need to be in the network.

Next was George Swallow from cisco on MPLS-TP and blurring the boundaries.  One comment he made was MPLS-TP not a radical new change, but a significant game changer.  Another point he made was if pseudowire service is end-to-end, then maybe we want MPLS-TP end-to-end as well, and if so, where is the boundary between packet and transport in this picture?  Very blurry.

After lunch was the Ethernet theme.  Andy Malis from Verizon kicked things off by discussing Verizon’s requirements for carrier Ethernet.  I had a chance to talk with him before his presentation and he made it clear to me that Verizon is doing PBB and MPLS-TP.  PBB-TE (PBT) is not a strategy for Verizon.  He went through the importance of the MEF standards as a common way to define services.  He also addressed the scalability comparison between H-VPLS and PBB+VPLS – guess who wins?

Luca Martini from cisco discussed his 10 years of pseudowires – where they came from and where they are going.  He commented on the fact that the standards bodies take so long to get things standardized, that his draft went through 153 revisions before it became RFC 4447.  RFC’s for multi-segment pseudowires are just about to come out, yet vendors have been supporting these pre-standard features for some time now.  The market does not wait for standards.

Other discussions today include Fast Restoration for VPLS, SAN services over MPLS, New Internet Architecture, Path Computation, and to wrap up the day Monique Morrow from cisco moderated a 10-person panel on emerging technologies.

Another very full day – hope I have some brain capacity left for tomorrow’s sessions.

Hello fellow techies.  If you are hungering for a rich meal of multicast VPNs with some MPLS-TP on the side, and MPLS in the Access for dessert – you have come to the right place.  These were the tutorial sessions today as the MPLS 2009 conference in Washington DC, and they were quite filling. In fact, I’m stuffed.

Let’s start with MPLS-TP.  Matthew Bocci and Lubo Tancevski from Alcatel-Lucent shared the near-impossible task of covering this topic in 1.5 hours.  They went through their slides extremely fast, such that even experts in this field would have missed quite a bit of what was said.  What I did catch was quite informative.  Much of the discussion was around defining what MPLS-TP is, or is not.  There were a few ideas floating around:  the presenters said that MPLS-TP is a subset of MPLS that is geared toward transport and not services.  Kireeti Kompella from Juniper brought up the point afterward that MPLS started as a transport mechanism, then we spent the last 10 years building services for it, and now we are stripping it back down to do just transport.  I must say he makes an excellent point, but everything in this industry comes full circle.  This is no different.

The presenters also spent a bit of time on OAM functions for MPLS-TP.  There are 3 ways to do OAM for MPLS-TP:

            Hop-by-hop through the control plane

            Out-of-band where replies come through a different path

            In-band – creating an associated channel

One of the requirements for MPLS-TP is that it be able to operate without a control plane.  Basically that means static provisioning through an NMS – the way typical SONet and OTN networks are provisioned today.   If it does operate with a control plane, it will be GMPLS.

Other areas of discussion include resiliency and protection using Protection Switching Coordination (PSC) protocol; use cases including Business VPN services, Carrier’s carrier, and mobile backhaul; and what’s going on with the standards.

All in all, an excellent presentation, I just wish we had 3 hours to cover it.

Up next was the equally speedy Multicast VPN technologies and Real World Deployments from Azhar Sayeed from cisco, and Maria Napierala from at&t.  They offered some great information on how multicast should work in MPLS to support MVPN, but much of the discussion was about using PIM vs. BGP in the MPLS network.  These guys were definitely the pro-PIM camp and every other slide was justification why PIM is better than BGP.  Of course I knew this would knot Juniper’s panties in a bunch, and sure enough the first person to the microphone after the presentation was Kireeti, and the second was Ina Minei.  Both said they felt the presentation was biased, and Maria challenged them to tell her where her findings were in error. 

The discussion also included the signaling component for P2MP and MP2MP LSP’s.  Basically RSVP-TE can only set up P2MP and if you want to do MP2MP, you must set up a full mesh of P2MP.  All the traffic engineering benefits still apply, so use this if you want hard QoS guarantees and FRR.  MLDP is a much simpler solution for setting up P2MP and MP2MP. 

Maria really hit the nail in the coffin with slides titled:  If PIM already exists and works, why use BGP.  Much of her presentation was regarding real-world architectures from at&t’s network and customers which shows deployments using GRE tunnels.  Her slides had a lot of great animations – too bad they don’t show up in the pdf version distributed by the conference. 

Another job well done, and again I wish the presenters had 3 hours to cover this topic. 

Last but not least was the MPLS in the Access topic by Kireeti from Juniper.  Apparently he had discussed this topic at last year’s conference, but felt that enough had changed and that it was important enough to revisit the topic this year. 

I enjoy Kireeti’s style of presentation and he is always a wealth of information.  His presentation introduced a whole new slew of terms (like we all need more acronyms to understand) and his main point is that the network should not determine which services can be offered, but the network should support any services that are offered.  So if you decouple the network from the services, you can place the service nodes (SN) anywhere you want.  You can centralize them, or you can push them out closer to the customer.  The Access Node (AN) is the first or last node in the provider’s network to handle packets from the customer at layer 2 and up.  The Transport Node (TN) just transports packets between AN and SN and SN and SN.  One other type of node was defined – the Service Helper Node (SH).  This node helps provide the services without ever touching the customer packets.  Examples of this might be a SIP server or Authentication device.

Other points in his presentation went through the challenges of having different network regions using different technologies, hence the argument for having MPLS end-to-end.  Some of the features required to do this are multi-segment pseudo-wires (MS-PW) and LSP stitching using labeled BGP.

Too bad Kireeti’s topic was at the end of a very full day. He too could have used 3 hours, but by this time my brain was full.

Generally speaking it was a great day, lots of rich nourishment for the MPLS-mind.  Stay tuned for my report on the sessions tomorrow which include:

MPLS Scaling

Fast Service Restoration for VPLS

SAN services over MPLS

Future Vision on Seamless Interconnection

Today was the start of the MPLS2009 conference by Isocore.  It could have been a great day, but it wasn’t.  The tutorials were actually quite good.  The technical presentations were well done and the presenters were actually good presenters.  But the management of the conference was sorely lacking.  

When you pay $1100 to attend this conference, there are some basic amenities that one would expect.

1.  Power

When you check in for the conference, they give you a package that includes a CD with all the presentations.  Of course you can have them as a reference after the conference, but some of us like to go through the slides on the laptop as the presenter is going through them on the big screen.  Some of us also like to type in notes of what the presenter is saying.  All of these things require you to have a laptop that has POWER.  In past conferences they did run power to every table, and the conference staff claim it will be there tomorrow, but why wasn’t it there today? 

2.  Internet Access

THIS IS A NETWORKING CONFERENCE!!!  How can you not have internet access in the meeting rooms???  If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny.  The aforementioned CD typically has out-of-date material because the presenters make some changes at the last minute.  So when you boot up the CD, there is an option to download the latest presentations from the internet.  KIND OF HARD TO DO WITHOUT ACCESS TO THE INTERNET!!!  Ya think?  Previous conferences had an attendee user name and password so that they could have access, but not this year.  I was told that no one was available to coordinate it this year.  WHAT?  I’m sorry, Internet access is as needful to this audience as food and water (or caffeine and sugar – see below).  Sure, those staying in the conference hotel have access through their room, but for those of us who still paid $1100 and are not staying at that hotel – what about us?

3.  Decaf coffee

OK, I am sure I’m in the minority here, after all this is a conference for engineering geeks who normally live on caffeine and sugar.  But for many people, a coffee break at 3:30pm is too late for caffeine.  So I waited in line at the coffee stand only to arrive at the pots and see there was no decaf.  A hotel waiter was standing behind the table and I asked him “where’s the decaf?”  I was told that of course the hotel has decaf, but our conference didn’t pay for it.  WHAT?  Too cheap to spring for decaf?  What’s up with that?

I made a list of my concerns and stopped by the desk to ask who I could discuss these items with.  One gentleman behind the table said I could talk to him….I bet he is regretting that decision.  Anyway, I voiced my concerns and was told that there would be power the next day, but the internet problem would not be rectified.  I don’t recall what he said about the decaf – I was too busy fuming over the internet thing.

There were a few good things today:  the presentations as I mentioned, and the bottled water that was available for attendees in addition to the nasty tap water on each table.  I will discuss the technical sessions in a later post.  First, I had to rant and get this off my chest.  Thanks for listening!!

(photo by R Z Armstrong)

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The Program Outline for this year:

Monday, October 26 TECHNICAL SESSIONS
9:00 – 10:30 am Opening SessionChair: Bijan Jabbari, Isocore	Introduction bijan Jabbari, Isocore Opening Speech Keynote Speech Raymond Zhang, BT Invited Talk: Local protection for LSP tail-end node failure Yakov Rekhter, Juniper Networks
Break & Exhibits 10:30 am – 11:00 am
11:00 am – 12:30 pm Scaling MPLSChair: Dave McDysan, Verizon	Scaling MPLS to 100,000 Nodes Kireeti Kompella, Juniper Networks Seamless MPLS Nicolai Leymann, Deutsche Telekom Pseudowires, MPLS and MPLS-TP: Blurring the Boundaries Between Access, Aggregation and Core Networks George Swallow, Cisco
Lunch & Exhibits 12:30 – 2:00 pm
2:00 – 3:30 pm MPLS/EthernetChair: Deborah Brungard, AT&T Labs and IETF	Verizon’s Requirements for IP/MPLS-Based Carrier Ethernet Networks Andrew Malis, Verizon 10 Years of Draft-Martini and PWs: Where are We Going? Luca Martini, Cisco Fast Service Restoration for VPLS Bhupesh Kothari, Juniper Networks SAN Services over MPLS and Carrier Ethernet Networks Sanjay Khanna, Brocade Communications Systems
Break & Exhibits 3:30 pm– 4:00 pm
4:00 – 5:00 pm VisionChair: Kohei Shiomoto, NTT	Architectural Principles for The New Public Internet Daniel Awduche, Verizon Selecting Domain Paths in Inter-Domain MPLS-TP and MPLS-TE Networks David Amzallag, Adrian Farrel, Daniel King, BT, Old Dog Consulting Future Vision on Seamless Interconnection of Transport Networks Tomonori Takeda, NTT
5:00 – 6:00 pm Panel: Emerging Technologies and Business Architectural Impact Chair: Monique Morrow, Cisco	Topic: Cloud Computing, P2P applications, Social Networking and Infrastructure Required to Scale Panelists: RAYMOND ZHANG, BT DANIEL AWDUCHE, Verizon DONN LEE, Facebook VIJAY GILL, Google ASWIN GUMASTE, IIT PAUL GERACI, Technology Survey Group GEORGE SWALLOW, Cisco BENSON SCHLIESSER, Savvis KIREETI KOMPELLA, Juniper Networks Hokuto Sanematsu, KDDI David Foote, Hitachi
Reception & Exhibits 6:00 – 7:30 pm

Tuesday, October 27 TECHNICAL SESSIONS
9:00 – 10:30 am MPLS-TPChair: Greg Miller, Verizon	Invited Talk: Co-development of Network Standards – the MPLS-TP case Loa Andersson, IETF and Ericsson Why MPLS-TP? Luyuan Fang, Nabil Bitar, Raymond Zhang, Cisco, Verizon, BT MPLS in Transport Networks Rahul Aggarwal, Juniper Networks
Break & Exhibits 10:30 am – 11:00 am
11:00 – 12:30 am MulticastChair: Daniel Awduche, Verizon	Using PCE to Support Multicast over a Multi-domain MPLS Transport Network Quintin Zhao, David Amzallag, Daniel King, Huawei Technologies, BT, Old Dog Consulting Multicast using RSVP P2MP LSP – Deployment Considerations Mustapha Aissaoui, Mark Blumhardt, Alcatel-Lucent Path Computation and Signaling P2MP LSPs in an Inter-domain Environment Zafar Ali, Tarek Saad, Cisco
Lunch & Exhibits 12:30 – 2:00 pm
2:00 – 3:30 pm Mobility Chair: David Sinicrope, Ericsson	Layer 2 Based Network Mobility Srikanth Chavali, Rishi Mehta, Ericsson Meeting the Timing Requirements of Mobile Base stations over IP/MPLS Backhaul Network Peter Roberts, Alcatel-Lucent Backhaul is in the Eye of the Beholder Pasula Reddy, Fujitsu MPLS-Based Architecture for LTE/WiMAX Core Network Esmael Dinan, Clearwire
Break & Exhibits 3:30 pm – 4:00 pm
4:00 – 5:00 pm ExperienceLoa Andersson, IETF and Ericsson	Experiences: Bringing MPLS to the Access with a Seamless MPLS Approach Thomas Beckhaus, Deutsche Telekom Deploying, Interworking, and operating L2 and L3 Shankar Narayanaswamy, Reliance Globalcom Architecture and strategy for Business VPN Services over DOCSIS Rajiv Asati, Cisco
5:00 – 6:00 pm Vendor PanelDave McDysan, Verizon	Kireeti Kompella, Juniper Networks Azhar Sayeed, Cisco Mustapha Aissaoui, Alcatel-Lucent David Sinicrope, Ericsson Sanjay Khanna, Brocade Communication Systems Vividh Siddha, IPInfusion Inc.

Wednesday, October 28 TECHNICAL SESSIONS
9:00 – 10:30 am GMPLSChair: NaoAki Yamanaka, Keio University	When is it Safe to Send Data in Network Controlled by GMPLS Control-plane? Kohei Shiomoto, NTT Establishment of Point-to-Multipoint path in GMPLS controlled Wide Area Ethernet KoU Kikuta, Keio University Development of Packet Transport System Using MPLS-TP Technologies Kenichi Sakamoto, Hitachi GMPLS Configuration of MPLS-TP OAM Elisa bellagamba, Ericsson Research
Break & Exhibits 10:30 am – 11:00 am
11:00 – 12:30 pm OAM & ResiliencyChair: Jerry Sobieski, NORDUnet	50ms protection for IP/LDP networks Hannes Gredler, Juniper Networks Software Architecture Blocks for Highly Convergent, Scalable and Stable L3VPNs Devendra Raut, Alcatel-Lucent Effectively design, Sell & Implement Custom Solutions for Enterprise Customers Mark Colclasure, Netformx Reliable SLAs Begin With Effective Testing Henry He, Ixia
Lunch & Exhibits 12:30 – 2:00 pm
2:00 – 3:30 pm Services and ApplicationsChair: Sonny Thorelli, Ericsson	Is your MPLS Network Ready for Triple Play? Peter Atanasovski, Agilent Simulations, Planning & Dimensioning Case Studies in IP/MPLS Networks Tony Lin, Amy Wang, David Wood, WANDL Using an Autonomic Platform for Self-Management of GMPLS Networks Thomas Bullot, Ginkgo Networks MPLS-TE Deployment Trends 2001-2009 Arman Maghbouleh, Cariden