IP Infusion to support MPLS-TP

A new version of IP Infusion’s ZebOS network platform software, currently under development, will support the emerging MPLS-TP standard, the company announced today.

Service providers are expected to use MPLS-TP for aggregation of mobile backhaul network traffic in order to deliver that traffic to core MPLS networks, said Shane Rigby, vice president of global sales for IP Infusion. Current carriers rely on Sonet- and ATM-based networks for that purpose, but MPLS-TP will provide a more cost-effective and scalable transport solution, Rigby said.

MPLS typically has not been used for aggregation because, as Rigby explained, “MPLS is great for the core, but as you extend it to the access network, different functionality is required.”

MPLS-TP aims to extend MPLS to aggregation networks by adding the required functionality. MPLS-TP “takes a lot of functionality from MPLS,” Rigby said. “It adds capabilities that weren’t there originally and takes out things that are not required to create a lower-cost extension.” The new capabilities relate primarily to extending the control plane from the core toward the network edge. On the flip side, Rigby added, “We’ve taken out a lot of redundancy that is not required for MPLS-TP.”

Standards for MPLS-TP have not been fully ratified, and MPLS-TP networks today exist only in prototype form. But Rigby expects to see deployments based on pre-standard versions of MPLS-TP by the end of this year. “By mid next year there will be full-scale deployments,” he said.

Network equipment manufacturers use software such as ZebOS to reduce the time required to develop their product offerings. “We try to get customers fast to market with low risk and at a lower cost than doing it themselves,” Rigby said. IP Infusion claims 200 equipment manufacturer customers worldwide.

“It’s crucial to expose what we’re doing to these guys so we can engage with them and work with them on their next-generation products,” Rigby said.

Although IP Infusion is not the only networking protocol stack supplier that is working on MPLS-TP, Rigby said the company plans to differentiate itself through its “total offering,” Rigby said. For example, he added, IP Infusion can support data center bridging standards, which will be important to cloud networking.