MPLS-TP AND

IP/MPLS

THEIR APPLICABILITY
FOR METRO NETWORKS

November 2012
Sponsored by ECI Telecom

MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

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MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 4
What is MPLS? ........................................................................................................................................ 4
How MPLS works..................................................................................................................................... 5
The evolving role of MPLS....................................................................................................................... 6
What is MPLS-TP? ................................................................................................................................... 7
How MPLS-TP works ............................................................................................................................... 7
The key differences between MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS ............................................................................. 9
Cost considerations ................................................................................................................................. 9
MPLS-TP-based applications ................................................................................................................. 10
Summary ............................................................................................................................................... 11

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MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

INTRODUCTION
Over the last decade MPLS has become established as the dominant transport technology of choice
in packet-based core networks. Until recently though, metro aggregation and metro access domains
continued to be primarily based on legacy SONET/SDH transport technology.
This is changing now. Faced by huge increases in packet-based traffic, operators have been shifting
to packet-based transport in metro networks in order to lower the cost per transported bit. Ethernet
was an early favourite technology for this migration, but initial attempts to use Ethernet for
transport faced quite a few limitations:

Lack of hard QoS support

Limited reliability
Limited scalability in terms of the number of services that can be supported
Lack of service management
Lack of legacy support.

Many of the drawbacks were linked directly to the connectionless nature of Ethernet. Significant
work has been invested across the telecoms industry in finding ways to make Ethernet more carrier
class. Some of these are based on enabling greater engineering of carrier Ethernet. Others are
based on using MPLS to support Ethernet service provision. In this context, while the natural step
looks like a simple extension of MPLS from the core to the metro, there are some key differences
between the metro and the core which make this challenging. As a result, work has been invested in
the development of an MPLS derivative, named MPLS-TP (Transport Profile).
This paper explores the role of MPLS and MPLS-TP in next generation telecoms networks, and the
differences in the way these protocols work. It also reviews the benefits of expanding the role of
MPLS as a transport solution; and analyses the various ways of doing this, and the pros and cons of
the different approaches.

WHAT IS MPLS?
Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a protocol-agnostic mechanism for transporting data using
either a connection-oriented approach (based on MPLS plus RSVP) or connectionless (IP/MPLS with
LDP). MPLS has been standardized by the IETF, and has been designed to carry both circuit and
packet traffic over virtual circuits known as LSPs. It achieves this because it does not examine the
traffic data itself. It makes forwarding decisions using labels that are added (and removed) by the
MPLS routers. This means it can act as a single transport mechanism for many different kinds of data
traffic: ATM, Ethernet, IP and TDM traffic can all be carried, and can use connection-oriented
mechanisms to ensure circuit-switched traffic can be delivered across a packet core. MPLS is a
packet-switching network technology generally seen as residing at layer 2.5 of the OSI model
(between the Data Link Layer at layer 2; and the Network Layer at layer 3).
MPLS (with traffic engineering) can support the delivery of carrier-class Ethernet services by
overcoming the main limitations of pure Ethernet as a transport technology, as the table below
shows.

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MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

MPLS

Ethernet

Scalability

Scalable (designed for core

networks)

Poor (VLAN scalability

limitations)

Transport type

Connection-oriented transport
is supported in MPLS and
MPLS-TP

Connectionless (a connectionoriented standard exists in the

form of PBB-TE but it has little
traction)

Traffic engineering

TE extensions have been

standardized to support explicit
routing

No (traffic engineering is
supported by PBB-TE)

Quality of Service

Yes using DiffServ

Supports class of service

End-to-end bandwidth
reservation

Yes

No (yes with PBB-TE)

Legacy (circuit-switched)
service support

Yes

No (yes with PBB-TE)

Response times

Medium (fast with engineered

resiliency over MPLS-TP)

Slow (fast with engineered

resiliency using PBB-TE)

Figure 1: Comparison between MPLS and Ethernet as transport technologies

HOW MPLS WORKS

Unlike IP which relies on look-ups within router tables at every hop in the network to determine
which route should be taken by individual packets, MPLS applies a label to traffic at the ingress
router (also known as a Label Edge Router or LER). This resides at the edge of the MPLS transport
network, and labels are subsequently used to direct that traffic through the core transit routers
(known as Label Switch Routers or LSRs). At the egress edge router the label is removed and the
traffic is forwarded to the user. The labels relate to paths, rather than the addresses of specific endpoints and the whole path from the ingress router towards the egress router is called the Label
Switched Path (LSP). The addition of a label at the ingress LER is called a Push operation, changing a
label in a transit LSR node is called a Swap operation and removing the label at the egress node is
called a Pop operation. The standard allows adding several labels on a packet, enabling hierarchy of
LSPs and a few protection mechanisms.
MPLS can provide multi-protocol support because it encapsulates other protocols with its own label
system. It can carry all the key network traffic types including ATM, Ethernet, frame relay, IP, and
TDM-based services, with connection-oriented services supported using pseudowires. MPLS
provides the capability to allocate a class of service to traffic, with a three-bit field within the label.
LSRs exchange label mapping and route information between themselves using label distribution
protocol (LDP) to build LSP forwarding information databases, so that labels are configured
automatically within every router in the path.

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MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

Extensive standardization work has extended MPLS to enable traffic engineering, and the protocol
now includes established features such as:

RSVP-TE (Resource Reservation Protocol Traffic Engineering) this enables applications to

access reserved bandwidth across the network (specified through parameters such as
bandwidth, burst speed and jitter)
MPLS Fast Reroute which provide resiliency by establishing LSP back-up paths
Point-to-multipoint LSPs to enable multicast.

THE EVOLVING ROLE OF MPLS

When operators looked to bring packet transport networking into the metro, MPLS was a leading
candidate as it was already established as the de facto standard for the packet core.
However, in order for MPLS to serve a useful role in edge, aggregation and access metro networks, it
needs to be able to meet similar operating standards as traditional circuit-based transport networks.
In other words it needs to deliver

Sophisticated OAM
Fast protection switching
Scalability
Strong traffic engineering
Cost efficiency.

Sophisticated OAM transport network engineers are used to systems that have been developed
over years and which deliver very strong operations, administration and maintenance (OAM)
toolkits. In its original incarnation MPLS did not provide the same levels of capability.
Fast protection switching transport environments based on circuit switching (such as SONET/SDH)
offer very fast protection switching. This is relied upon to ensure customer experience and
continuity of important services. Operators deploying an MPLS-based transport network in access,
aggregation and edge networks must be able to match this benchmark level of performance with
restoration achieved in under 50ms something that cannot be achieved with MPLS fast reroute
without the support of RSVP-TE (which is complex and has scale limitations).
Scalability is critical because the access and aggregation environment can encompass thousands of
nodes many more than are typically found in core network environments. This means any routing,
resiliency and restoration architectures must be able to cope with much heavier processing and the
larger number of entities supported at each node.
Traffic engineering is required by network operations teams that want complete control, and the
ability to carefully, and closely, manage the usage and performance of the network, and to deliver a
deterministic, connection-orientated transport environment for those services that require it.
Cost efficiency is critical because metro and core topologies and scale are very different. This makes
the operational complexity a key factor in network TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). MPLS-based
network elements are expensive as they support the IP protocol stack and need to support a
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MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

distributed control plane. The introduction of IP elements would impose a steep learning curve on
metro network managers needing to adapt to complex IP configuration and working procedures.
Combined, these factors were all drivers for a new variant of MPLS, named MPLS-TP, to deliver the
relevant MPLS functionality while minimising cost and complexity.

WHAT IS MPLS-TP?
MPLS-TP (MPLS Transport Profile) is a connection-oriented, deterministic, packet-switched transport
protocol. It has been developed through the cooperation of the IETF and ITU-T, with the ambition of
creating a version of MPLS optimised for transport networks. This transport-optimized solution
embodies the following characteristics:

It has a list of features optimized for carrier-class transport networks

It supports operational models for the deployment of data services that are familiar to and
more closely aligned to transport network operational models than core IP networking
It provides a similar level of predictability for packet transport networking, as is currently
enjoyed with circuit-based transport networks
It enables operators to avoid the cost of deploying nodes with the processing needed to
support a distributed control plane; and offers static configuration (and operational
familiarity) through a transport-grade Network Management System (NMS).

MPLS-TP is often described as a profile of MPLS. It might equally be described as a daughter

protocol of MPLS, because it takes a subset of the MPLS DNA (i.e. a subset of its capabilities) and
brings some new DNA such as new extensions developed to ensure MPLS-TP can deliver a carriergrade transport platform. The MPLS-TP specifications are encapsulated in a variety of IETF RFCs; the
most important are RFC 5654 and RFC 5921, which have been developed jointly by the IETF and the
ITU-T.

HOW MPLS-TP WORKS

In order to make MPLS-TP more acceptable as a transport networking platform, it operates without
a set of MPLS features which are not compatible with connection-oriented networking:

Penultimate Hop Popping. Removing the MPLS label at the penultimate rather than final
MPLS hop to reduce load on the egress router is disabled because it cannot be assumed that
IP will be used for forwarding at the final router
Equal Cost Multi-Path. The ability to forward packets over a variety of equally best paths is
disabled, as it is incompatible with deterministic behaviour, and requires tracking of packet
performance.
Label Merge. The ability to merge traffic with different labels or from different interfaces to
a single label is forbidden, as this leads to loss of information about the source and the
complexity of monitoring each path individually.

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MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

Although it relies on MPLS-based mechanisms for forwarding data using labels albeit with some
additional label modifications, MPLS-TP functions without a distributed control plane, instead relying
on network management systems (NMS) for path provisioning. Establishment of LSPs using a control
plane is also standardized using the Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) set of RFCs which provide carrierclass control-plane extensions for MPLS. In MPLS-TP even if the control plane breaks temporarily, a
data connection must persist because the control and transport planes are separated. At the same
time as losing some undesirable characteristics, MPLS-TP brings a number of much-needed
capabilities which make it much more attractive to transport network engineers, including:

Additional data plane OAM capabilities. In MPLS-TP the OAM data is carried in a dedicated
in-band signalling channel, Generic Associated Channel, or G-Ach. Key features include
o
o
o
o
o
o

Alarm indication signal (AIS)

Continuity Check (CC) and Continuity Verification (CV) using Bi-directional
Forwarding Detection (BFD)
Link Defect Indication (LDI)
Trace-route and Ping for LSPs
Loss and delay measurement
In-band Management and Control Communication Channel.

Enhanced protection capabilities. MPLS-TP has been designed to ensure that operators can
meet sub-50ms targets for path protection, in a variety of network physical configurations.
Key features include
o
o
o

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End-to-end deterministic path protection

<50ms protection switching (based on failure or degradation of signals)
Support for various protection designs (e.g., 1:1, 1+1, 1:N).

MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

THE KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MPLS-TP AND IP/MPLS

The key differences between MPLS and MPLS-TP for use in metro access / aggregation are
summarised in the following table.

Factor

MPLS

MPLS-TP

Control plane

Automated, integrated with

data plane

Manual or automated, distinct

from data plane, deterministic

Devices

More complex

Less complex

Standardization maturity

Very mature

Emerging

Global deployment status

Vast volumes

Small, but growing volumes

Vendor interoperability

Established

Emerging

Service restoration speed

> 50 ms

< 50 ms

Service protection mechanisms

Re-Route, Fast Re-Route

1:1, 1+1, 1:N protection

Skill set

Familiar to routing engineers

Familiar to transport engineers

OAM features

IP-based BFD, LSP Ping, LSP

Traceroute traversing controlplane path

BFD, AIS, CC, CV, LSP Ping, LSP

Traceroute, loss and delay
measurement, RDI
traversing data-plane path

Figure 2: Comparison of the transport qualities of MPLS and MPLS-TP

COST CONSIDERATIONS
The implementation of an end-to-end MPLS / MPLS-TP-based architecture is primarily aimed at
delivering opex savings. Opex savings are expected to be achieved because operators can converge
their TDM, ATM, frame relay and Ethernet access and aggregation networks on to a single Ethernetand MPLS-based infrastructure. This enables them to remove legacy ATM, frame relay and TDM
equipment which is costly to maintain, and hard to find spares for. It also enables statistical
multiplexing for packet data that might have been travelling over the legacy TDM-based
infrastructures. Moreover, it allows management and maintenance of a single transport network
rather than multiple networks.
By integrating the access and aggregation networks operators also hope to benefit from improved
end-to-end visibility, a reduction in the complexity of managing the transport networks, and a
reduction in the number of different provisioning, management and OAM systems that need to be
maintained and monitored.
But when it comes to deploying either MPLS-TP or IP/MPLS in any given domain the issue of cost
requires significant attention. Key factors to consider are shown in the table below.

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MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

Factor

Difference between MPLS-TP and MPLS

Capex

MPLS-TP devices can be less sophisticated than full IP/MPLS routers, and so
cost less in the first place

Energy consumption

MPLS-TP devices require much less processing power, and so consume

much less energy than an IP/MPLS router, saving on energy costs

Operations cost

MPLS-TP network operation requires the same sorts of regular and

standard skills as any other transport technology. Maintenance and
troubleshooting procedures of IP/MPLS however requires high expertise
and is prone to user/CLI errors. Hence cost of the staff is high and
troubleshooting is time-consuming

Efficiency of network
usage

MPLS-TP can be engineered to make more efficient use of the network

than IP/MPLS (e.g. through careful management of utilisation of back-up
paths), a task which is much more complex and limited in a dynamic,
automated transport network environment

Network Availability

As troubleshooting and fault isolation is inherently more complex with

IP/MPLS (as control plane and data plane are not sharing necessarily the
same path), the downtime of a network in case of a failure is higher,
resulting with direct and indirect cost for operators.

Figure 3: Comparison between MPLS and MPLS-TP cost considerations

MPLS-TP is more suitable for the metro carrier-class environment for the following reasons.

It is simple to operate and manage

It is scalable for large networks
It has lower network element cost and complexity
It is robust and predictable.

Overall, MPLS-TP provides all the benefits of MPLS but without the complications of running control
planes on a large number of network elements.

MPLS-TP-BASED APPLICATIONS
MPLS-TP is being considered by operators for a variety of purposes in access and aggregation
network environments, including:

Regional and metro aggregation supporting the aggregation of a variety of traffic types
(e.g. ATM, Ethernet, frame relay and TDM), over a single converged packet-based transport
infrastructure
Mobile backhaul providing a deterministic, connection-oriented backhaul infrastructure
that can carry 2G, 3G and LTE traffic over packet-based infrastructure, but providing a
transport networking environment which is familiar to mobile network operators
Retail business service improvement e.g. to provide deterministic, secure, connectionorientated networking across virtual networks for sensitive applications such as fixed and
mobile videoconferencing or for cloud-based services.

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MPLS-TP and IP/MPLS their applicability for metro networks

SUMMARY
Operators now have a mix of technology choices for next generation access, aggregation and
metro/regional transport networks. As they migrate towards converged transport solutions based
on packet networks, they will have to choose between them. For some, the benefits of carrier
Ethernet will remain compelling. This is a comparatively low-cost technology, with strong transport
capabilities.
However, MPLS-TP offers an alternative architectural approach which has attracted the attention
and support of some of the very largest network operators. IP/MPLS and MPLS-TP each have their
own roles to play in the network. MPLS-TP is optimized for scalability, simplicity and cost and so suits
aggregation and metro networking environments. MPLS is tried and tested as a scalable, robust
transport platform for core network environments, and whilst more expensive than MPLS-TP due to
the increased processing capabilities of the devices, it has the traffic engineering capabilities to
ensure that core networks run efficiently.
IP/MPLS is entrenched as a core network technology; MPLS-TP is not suitable for that role. MPLS-TP
supports the extension of attractive MPLS capabilities into metro and aggregation network
environments without the MPLS drawbacks. MPLS and MPLS-TP are clearly complementary.

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