What is LDP?
Introduction to LDP and its uses
Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) is one of the label distribution protocols supported by DC-MPLS. DC-LDP provides a complete, scalable, and fault-tolerant source code implementation of LDP.
DC-LDP is designed for OEMs building both core and edge routers, and provides a wide range of protocol extension for VPN, VPWS and VPLS, including RFC2547 BGP/MPLS VPNs and PWE3 (Martini).
The diagram below shows the architecture of the DC-LDP software and its interfaces to other components.
DC-LDP Features
LDP Protocol Function
The DC-LDP software product includes the following LDP protocol function.
- RFC 3036
- IPv4 and IPv6 support
- Unnumbered interface
- Support for all combinations of label management modes
- Downstream Unsolicited and Downstream on Demand Label Advertisement
- Liberal and Conservative Label Retention
- Ordered and Independent Label Distribution
- Targeted adjacencies
- Loop Detection using both Hop Count and Path Vector
- Layer 2 VPNs
- VPWS (Martini) draft-ietf-pwe3-control-protocol
- VPLS draft-ietf-L2vpn-vpls-ldp
- Layer 3 VPNs
- RFC 2547 extensions
- LSP Ping
- ietf-mpls-lsp-ping-04
- Extensible for OEM specific requirements
- Support for private objects and TLVs
- Proprietary data transferred across external interfaces for OEM processing
- Support for proprietary MIB extensions
- Support for OEM specific authentication
Management and Integration
- Fully MIB manageable
- LSR MIB
- LDP MIB
- Product management MIBs for consistent management interface
- Easily integrated with SNMP, CORBA, CMIP, CLI, Web or other management paradigms
- Pre-integrated CLI, XML/Web and SNMP management interfaces available through embeddedMINDTM from Silicon & Software Systems (S3)
- High availability and fault tolerance in management of configuration information when used with Configuration Safe Store
Carrier Class Design
- Scalability
- Optimized mainline for very fast LSP establishment
- Binary trees ensure scaling of O(ln(N)) with number of LSPs supported
- No hard-coded limits to number of interfaces or LSPs supported
- Designed to handle thousands of interfaces and millions of LSPs
- Distribution of components onto multiple cards
- Carrier class availability
- RFC 3478 Graceful restart
- Availability and fault tolerance in management of configuration information possible with Configuration Safe Store
- See High Availability for more details
- Interoperability
- Major vendors: interoperates with all major implementations, including Cisco and Juniper
- UNH: We have successfully attended all the UNH interop events for testing all aspects of DC-MPLS. See http://www.ioh.unh.edu/consortiums/mplsServices/ for details.
- We assist customers in their own testing, either in their labs or at customer field trials
- Guarantee: interoperability problems are treated as problems and fixed within the same schedules.
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For more information about Data Connection's MPLS products and expertise contact dcmpls@dataconnection.com.