Connectionless Service

A significant technical advantage of MPLS VPNs is that they are connectionless. The Internet owes its success to its basic technology, TCP/IP. TCP/IP is built on a packet-based, connectionless network paradigm. This means that no prior action is necessary to establish communication between hosts, making it easy for two parties to communicate. To establish privacy in a connectionless IP environment, current VPN solutions impose a connection-oriented, point-to-point overlay on the network. Even if it runs over a connectionless network, a VPN cannot take advantage of the ease of connectivity and multiple services available in connectionless networks. When you create a connectionless VPN, you do not need tunnels and encryption for network privacy, thus eliminating significant complexity.

Centralized Service

Building VPNs in Layer 3 allows delivery of targeted services to a group of users represented by a VPN. A VPN must give service providers more than a mechanism for privately connecting users to intranet services. It must also provide a way to flexibly deliver value-added services to targeted customers. Scalability is critical, because customers want to use services privately in their intranets and extranets. Because MPLS VPNs are seen as private intranets, you may use new IP services such as:

• Multicast

• Quality of service (QoS)

• Telephony support within a VPN

• Centralized services including content and web hosting to a VPN

You can customize several combinations of specialized services for individual customers. For example, a service that combines IP multicast with a low-latency service class enables video conferencing within an intranet.

Scalability

If you create a VPN using connection-oriented, point-to-point overlays, Frame Relay, or ATM virtual connections (VCs), the VPN’s key deficiency is scalability. Specifically, connection-oriented VPNs without fully meshed connections between customer sites are not optimal. MPLS-based VPNs, instead, use the peer model and Layer 3 connectionless architecture to leverage a highly scalable VPN solution. The peer model requires a customer site to peer with only one provider edge (PE) device as opposed to all other customer edge (CE) devices that are members of the VPN. The connectionless architecture allows the creation of VPNs in Layer 3, eliminating the need for tunnels or VCs.

Other scalability issues of MPLS VPNs are due to the partitioning of VPN routes between PE devices and the further partitioning of VPN and Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) routes between PE devices and provider (P) devices in a core network.

• PE devices must maintain VPN routes for those VPNs who are members.

• P devices do not maintain any VPN routes.

This increases the scalability of the provider’s core and ensures that no one device is a scalability bottleneck.

Security

MPLS VPNs offer the same level of security as connection-oriented VPNs. Packets from one VPN do not inadvertently go to another VPN.

Security is provided in the following areas:

• At the edge of a provider network, ensuring packets received from a customer are placed on the correct VPN.

• At the backbone, VPN traffic is kept separate. Malicious spoofing (an attempt to gain access to a PE device) is nearly impossible because the packets received from customers are IP packets. These IP packets must be received on a particular interface or subinterface to be uniquely identified with a VPN label.

Ease of Creation

To take full advantage of VPNs, customers must be able to easily create new VPNs and user communities. Because MPLS VPNs are connectionless, no specific point-to-point connection maps or topologies are required. You can add sites to intranets and extranets and form closed user groups. Managing VPNs in this manner enables membership of any given site in multiple VPNs, maximizing flexibility in building intranets and extranets.

Flexible Addressing

To make a VPN service more accessible, customers of a service provider can design their own addressing plan, independent of addressing plans for other service provider customers. Many customers use private address spaces, as defined in RFC 1918, and do not want to invest the time and expense of converting to public IP addresses to enable intranet connectivity. MPLS VPNs allow customers to continue to use their present address spaces without network address translation (NAT) by providing a public and private view of the address. A NAT is required only if two VPNs with overlapping address spaces want to communicate. This enables customers to use their own unregistered private addresses, and communicate freely across a public IP network.

Integrated QoS Support

QoS is an important requirement for many IP VPN customers. It provides the ability to address two fundamental VPN requirements:

• Predictable performance and policy implementation

• Support for multiple levels of service in an MPLS VPN

Network traffic is classified and labeled at the edge of the network before traffic is aggregated according to policies defined by subscribers and implemented by the provider and transported across the provider core. Traffic at the edge and core of the network can then be differentiated into different classes by drop probability or delay.

Straightforward Migration

For service providers to quickly deploy VPN services, use a straightforward migration path. MPLS VPNs are unique because you can build them over multiple network architectures, including IP, ATM, Frame Relay, and hybrid networks.

Migration for the end customer is simplified because there is no requirement to support MPLS on the CE device and no modifications are required to a customer’s intranet.