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Marwan ALshawi
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

In today’s modern networks the interaction between applications and network infrastructures is increasingly important for service providers, content providers and enterprise businesses. The more network operators can interact with the network the more optimization to applications can be offered, which ultimately can offer new services that can generate incremental revenues.

In the past decade, large scale network operators have invested heavily in network infrastructure because of exploding growth in IP traffic. During the same period, their legacy revenues either stalled or declined, while new revenue streams did not make up for the loss.

With these type of infrastructure that lack to any advanced interaction with applications, especially, the applications and network infrastructure have been running in isolation. For example, the network infrastructure has no insight into which types of applications are being transported, in turn this can impact the SLAs expected by the end users.

Although Traffic engineering techniques, such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) traffic engineering, is commonly deployed by some service provider networks. However, they came with limitations such as scalability, operational complexity, and more. Although, with MPLS-TE the interaction between applications and network infrastructure was noticeably enhanced, it was not to the degree that meets the latest service providers and large enterprises challenges. For example:

  • The sheer number of application flows is increasing, as a result of 4K video, mobility, cloud services, and the Internet of Everything.
  • Application flows have increasingly dynamic and changing traffic patterns.
  • Applications flow control in the WAN is no longer sufficient to deliver a best-in-class customer experience; end-to-end control is now required.

Legacy traffic engineering techniques are struggling to deliver the expected outcomes. Therefore, network operators need a new approach to bring applications and network interaction to the next level, particularly in the software-defined network (SDN) era.

At the time of this article writing, Cisco addresses the above challenges with its Application Engineered Routing solution innovation that is specifically aimed at solving the issues and limitations highlighted above. This solution has three main components:

  • Applications
  • SDN controller (Cisco WAN Automation Engine WAE)
  • Network infrastructure.

The most vital element of this solution is how these components work together as integrated manner, as following:

  • The applications communicate their requirements, such as bandwidth, latency, SLAs, and preferred path to the SDN controller.
  • The SDN controller collects essential data from the network, such as the topology, link states, and traffic matrix - including link utilization and latency. The SDN controller takes into account the application requirements and the overall state of the network, then computes a specific network path and encodes it as a list of segments.
  • The SDN controller programs a single per-flow state at the first-hop router in front of the application. The specified flow is classified, and the list of segments is inserted in the packet header. From then on, the requirements of the application flow are delivered end to end by the multidomain network, from the data center through the WAN, and from Metro network on to the end users, without any further per-flow state programming, neither for forwarding nor for reclassification.

The below figure summarizes the aforementioned points.

Figure1

 

In addition, if the state of the network changes or the application communicates new requirements, the SDN controller computes a new network path, encodes it as an updated list of segments, and reprograms a single perflow state at the first-hop router in front of the application. Other parts of network do not need to be changed.

The question here is, how this segment routing concept works?

Segment Routing 

Segment Routing has been designed with SDN in mind and offers the right balance between distributed intelligence, centralized optimization, and application-based policy creation. Also, Segment Routing offers a simplified operational, optimized scalability, and more efficient utilization of the installed infrastructure.

Cisco has been at the forefront of this routing innovation since years, through thought leadership, standardization, product creation, and deployment.

  • Segment: A segment is a 32-bit identification for either a topological instruction or a service instruction. A segment can be either global or local. The following instructions could be used in a segment:
    • Service
    • Context
    • Locator
    • IGP-based forwarding construct
    • BGP-based forwarding construct
    • Local value or global index
  • Global Segment: Any node in the segment-routing domain understands the instruction associated with a global segment. Any node in the domain installs the related instruction in its Forwarding Information Base (FIB). Global segments fall in a subspace of the segment (or label) space called the Segment Routing Global Block (SRGB). The SRGB is usually defined as the range 16000 to 23999, and all the nodes in a network are allocated the same SRGB;
  • Local Segment: The instruction associated with a local segment is supported by only the node originating it. No other node installs a remote local segment in its FIB. 
  • IGP Segments: IGP (OSPF or IS-IS) can allocate segments for different purposes. E.g. A node segment is a segment allocated to a loopback that identifies a specific node

In the scenario illustrated below, the “16008” is the node segment of router Y, and allocated to the loopback of router Y, so when a packet injected by the head end router X to the network with top segment 16008, it will reach Y by the shortest-path. In this scenario ECMP path is used to reach Y.  

figure2

  • Adjacency Segment: An adjacency segment is a local segment signaled by IS-IS or OSPF; it is used to steer traffic onto an adjacency or a set of adjacencies.
  • BGP Prefix Segment: The BGP prefix segment is a global segment signaled by BGP associated to a prefix that is used to steer traffic along the ECMP-aware shortest path to the BGP prefix
  • BGP Peering Segment: The BGP segment is a local segment signaled by BGP Link State (topology information) to a SDN controller; it is used to steer traffic onto a BGP peer or over specific links.

However, Path computation in large, multidomain networks is a complex task and requires special computational components and cooperation between the elements in different domains. In IP/MPLS networks, this functionality is referred to as a Path Computation Element (PCE), as defined by RFC 4655. Cisco WAN Automation Engine WAE, acts as an external PCE Server, providing a centralized traffic-engineering database (TED). Nodes, endpoints, and applications that wish to request network paths that differ from the standard Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) shortest path can make Representational State Protocol (REST) API queries to WAE, which in turn calculates a network path matching the specific requirement. WAE then programs the network path to the network. In networks utilizing SR, Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP) is the protocol commonly used between WAE and the multivendor nodes. 

With this approach, network operators can achieve and advanced level of interaction between the applications and the underlying infrastructure enabled by the Cisco SDN controller (WAE) and segment routing technology.  

 

For example, the scenario illustrated in the figure below, The Cisco WAE is acting as an external PCE Server for centralized SR path calculations.

figure3

If an application requests 500 Mbps of end-to-end bandwidth over a low latency path, the IGP shortest path isn’t capable to provide this level of routing capability. However, WAE calculates the next-shortest path that fulfills the requirements and then uses PCEP to signal a list of segments to the head-end router (router X in the example). 

The WAE as the SDN controller (PCE) will consider lower-latency path which would be translated into the segment of link with peer ID 166. Also, the PCE may learn the topology using BGPLS,IGP, SNMP, etc.

Figure4

Note that with Segment Routing, the head-end router is the only router in the network that needs to be programmed by the controller (WAE), and it is the only place where this network state is maintained.

 

This was one example of the various scenarios this solution can optimize such as, advanced traffic engineering (without the complexity of RSVP-TE) and efficient MPLS VPN forwarding. 

Kind regards, 

Marwan Alshawi

For more information about Cisco WAN Automation Engine:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/routers/wan-automation-engine/index.html

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/wan-automation-engine/solution-overview-c22-731815.html

 

Comments
abdel-moniem
Level 5
Level 5

Great Document Marwan, Thank you for  sharing

B.kablawi90
Level 1
Level 1

Thanks for sharing 

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