aggregate multiple OC-1 or OC-3

[Sherif Atef Ahmed Ismail]

Dears,

Would like your assistance plz regarding below

How to aggregagate multiple OC-1 or OC-3 ?

In Juniper, this can be done using "aggregate sonet" similar to Etherchannel but for sonet interfaces

I wonder If this can be done at Cisco

Thing that came to my mind is to use ppp multilink however what I know it is used only for E1/T1 interfaces .. not sure If it can be done for OC-x interfaces

Any Ideas

Best Regards

Sherif Ismail

[Marvin Rhoads]

What platform and OS are you inquiring about? I wasn't aware that any of Cisco's routing platforms offered OC-1 interfaces. They are in the SONET/SDH world but there circuit aggregation usually means entirely different things than what you seem to be asking about.

You are correct that MLPPP is only for T-1/E-1 interfaces. Reference.

[Tom Randstrom]

This looks to be a form of Virtual Concatenation (VCAT), that is available on most of the 15454 data cards. 

Background from Juniper website:

" The JUNOS software enables link aggregation of SONET/SDH interfaces; this is similar to Ethernet link aggregation, but is not defined in a public standard. The JUNOS software balances traffic across the member links within an aggregated SONET/SDH bundle based on the Layer 3 information carried in the packet. This implementation uses the same load balancing algorithm used for per-packet load balancing.

Note:

SONET/SDH aggregation is proprietary to the JUNOS software and might not work with other software."

[Sherif Atef Ahmed Ismail]

Thanks Marvin/Tom for your reply .. it was really helpful

So this can not be done on cisco routers as 7600, ASR9000 or CRS , correct ?

Many Thanks

[Marvin Rhoads]

You're welcome, Sherif.

Correct - the router platforms you mention do not offer OC-1 interfaces and thus they don't allow one to aggregate OC-1 signals. They each offer OC-3 interfaces but one cannot aggregate them together (AFAIK).

As Tom correctly mentioned, VCAT is commonly available and used on the CISCO ONS 15454 SONET/SDH platforms.

[Sherif Atef Ahmed Ismail]

Thanks

[Sherif Atef Ahmed Ismail]

Hello Marvin

I found below link accidentally  ... it seems that IOS XR do offer link bundling but for OC-3/OC-12 ; i.e not OC-1 as you mentioned

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/routers/xr12000/software/xr12k_r4.1/interfaces/configuration/guide/hc41lbun.pdf

But dont know If we can load-balance packets on these links based on mpls labels ??

Best Regards

Sherif Ismail