L2VPN Services Over Segment Routing For Traffic ... - Cisco

Segment Routing (SR) is a flexible and scalable way of performing source routing. The source device selects a path and encodes it in the packet header as an ordered list of segments. Segments are identifiers for any type of instruction.

Segment routing for traffic engineering (SR-TE) takes place through a tunnel between a source and destination pair. SR-TE uses the concept of source routing, where the source calculates the path and encodes it in the packet header as a segment. In SR-TE preferred path, each segment is an end-to-end path from the source to the destination, and instructs the routers in the provider core network to follow the specified path instead of the shortest path calculated by the IGP. The destination is unaware of the presence of the tunnel.

The user can achieve better resilience and convergence for the network traffic, by transporting MPLS L2VPN services using segment routing, instead of MPLS LDP. Segment routing can be directly applied to the MPLS architecture without changing the forwarding plane. In a segment-routing network that uses the MPLS data plane, LDP or other signaling protocol is not required; instead label distribution is performed by IGP. Removing protocols from the network simplifies its operation and makes it more robust and stable by eliminating the need for protocol interaction. Segment routing utilizes the network bandwidth more effectively than traditional MPLS networks and offers lower latency.

Preferred tunnel path functionality allows you map pseudowires to specific traffic-engineering tunnel paths. Attachment circuits are cross-connected to specific SR traffic engineering tunnel interfaces instead of remote PE router IP addresses reachable using IGP or LDP. Using preferred tunnel path, the traffic engineering tunnel transports L2 or L3 traffic between the source and destination PE routers. A path is selected for an SR Policy when the path is valid and its preference is the best (highest value) among all the candidate paths of the SR Policy.

The following L2VPN services are supported over SR-TE policy:

• EVPN VPWS Preferred Path over SR-TE Policy

• L2VPN VPLS or VPWS Preferred Path over SR-TE Policy

• EVPN VPWS On Demand Next Hop with SR-TE