MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies

7.6. BENEFITS OF THE BGP/MPLS VPN SOLUTION

BGP/MPLS VPNs allow the customer to offload routing between the sites to the provider and enable the service provider to offer value-added services to its customers, such as firewall and authentication.

The BGP/MPLS VPN approach allows the provider to leverage the infrastructure to service multiple VPN customers, rather than managing a virtual backbone for each customer. The PE–PE MPLS tunnels are used to carry traffic for multiple VPNs and multiple applications. By hiding the VPN information from the core of the network, the complexity is kept at the PE routers and the service can grow by adding more PE routers when needed.

The property of MPLS that is most powerful in the context of BGP/MPLS VPNs is tunneling. Tunneling using MPLS enables:

1. Building a hierarchy of routing knowledge. Tunneling makes it possible to forward traffic to addresses that are not known in the middle of the network, thus shielding P routers from any VPN knowledge.

2. Identifying traffic as belonging to a particular VPN at the egress point from the provider's network.

3. Providing straightforward and low-cost protection against packet spoofing.

The BGP/MPLS VPN solution builds on existing protocols and technology, only extending the protocols where necessary. It is a great example of the inventing versus reusing paradigm discussed in earlier chapters. The principles discussed in this chapter form the foundation of other MPLS applications, such as L2VPNs and VPLS. However, ...