Nortel pushes MPLS across multiple network domains

Nortel Networks hopes to use multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) as a way to integrate multiple networks and to address network challenges such as service provisioning, evolution and efficiency.

“We think we can take the elements of MPLS and extend the application into multiple domains,” said Marco Pagani, vice president/general manager of Nortel’s Carrier Networks Division.

Nortel will use of generalized MPLS (GMPLS) “as a mechanism for introducing MPLS-like connection-oriented mechanisms into the network” in the optical, wireless and data domains, Pagani said.

Traditionally, MPLS has been in the Internet Protocol (IP), virtual private networking (VPN) and traffic engineering spaces. Nortel’s goal is to take it across every transport--from Ethernet to ATM to SONET—to let those various transports to interact.

“We think you start with the core and work out towards the edges of the network. There’s going to be a unified packet core, and it will be MPLS-based,” Pagani said.

An adaptation layer on that MPLS-based core will take legacy ATM, frame relay and circuit emulation traffic, IP traffic, Ethernet traffic and “do aggregation and adaptation into an MPLS-based core,” he said. “Technically speaking, you put MPLS-based headers on those packet streams, and you transport them in an MPLS-like manner into this unified core.”

Pagani said MPLS will help bridge the gap between a “$1 trillion dollar investment out there today” in existing infrastructure and emerging networks that step beyond those specifications.

“As long as there’s a need to have multiple paradigms and multiple networking protocols co-existing in the network, then this translation function is going to be required to ensure that you have one unified packet MPLS-based core at the heart of your next-generation network,” he said.

Nortel will trial GMPLS in the optical domain next year. It’s already incorporates MPLS capabilities into products that “are going to be the building blocks of the next-generation IP core, which will be MPLS-centric,” Pagani said.