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BPP VPLS in ISP backbone

shreerampardhy
Level 1
Level 1

Has anyone configured PBB VPLS ( 802.1ah ) solution in ISP backbone before? When we are using PBB, we are actually hiding the customer Mac addresses by encapsulating the customer frame with the Provider frame ( mac in mac ). But it gets a little bit confusing when we use this solution with MPLS enabled core. Please can anyone advice on the level of labels that can be seen for ELINE and ELAN options with PBB?

Regards,

Shreeram

2 Replies 2

nyechiel
Level 1
Level 1

Hello Shreeram,

802.1ah (also known as QinQ) is a VLAN tunneling technique that mostly designed for pure L2 environments. Normally you wouldn't run it inside a MPLS service but as a solution to provide a L2VPN with devices that do not support MPLS.

With that said, it is possible to run 802.1ah in the access domain of the provider (which is a pure L2 setup in most cases) and MPLS-enabled services in the core:

If you will analyze the forwarding plane, customer traffic tagged with C-VLAN (customer VLAN) will get encapsulated with a second provider/service VLAN (S-VLAN) to uniquly identify the service in the access/L2 domain. The traffic can then be mapped into a L2 circuit (such as E-Line or E-LAN) when it hits the provider edge, where two MPLS labels will be used in most cases: one (inner) to identify the service (VC label) and another one (topmost) to identify the remote PE (Tunnel/Transport label). In the remote side, the MPLS labels will be stripped at the destination PE, and the S-VLAN will then be removed. From the customer point of view, the frames are getting from one side to the other untouched.

Hope I answered your question,

Nir

Hello Nir,

Thank you very much for your explaination. The point of confusion is when we have the Mac in Mac option and the labels on top of it. Once the QinQ ( 802.1ad ) frame reaches the edge of the core to enter the 802.1ah boundary, it gets encapsulated in the PBB frame where we have the BMac addresses attached along with ISID and the BVLAN. From my understanding, the labels that are attached on top of the PBB frame are related only to this BVLAN. Like you have mentioned, the top label would be the tunnel label exchanged between the PE routers participating in the B-VPLS while the bottom label relating to the B-VPLS instance.

It would be great if there is any working example for this

Regards,

Shreeram