Multiprotocol Label Switching Virtual Private Network

Abstract

A Service provider network must have the capability of facing the challenge of customer demands, especially when there are thousands or even tens of thousands of customer traffic to be carried within a single network infrastructure. Also there must be some solu-tions to provide new services that are not supported within the service provider network. A conventional IP lookup process and forwarding do not scale well and there must be some ways for fast lookup and packet forwarding

This thesis aimed to present and implement the technology that would allow the service provider to face this challenge and have the capability to serve new services that are not supported within his network infrastructure. In the service provider network, every cus-tomer or service is represented by an MPLS VPN and it is completely independent.

Moreover, the thesis introduced some advanced MPLS topologies, an intranet where cus-tomer sites are connected through a central site, an extranet where various customer sites are connected to each other and central services where a central server can be deployed to serve a specific customer, various customers or it can be connected to the Internet. In addition, inter-autonomous MPLS VPN, where customer sites are connected over multiple service providers, AToM and VPLS are briefly presented.

The MPLS VPN theory and implementations provided in this thesis are applied to Cisco routers only. Different vendors have different implementations, for example in MPLS, Cisco requires enabling MPLS in the interface mode. However, some vendors require enabling it in the global configuration mode even though the concept of MPLS is the same in every vendor.