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UUNET's massive MPLS deployment underway


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By Denise Pappalardo
Network World Fusion, 07/21/99

UUNET, MCI WorldCom's ISP division, is deploying new high-end routers in its European network that will support IP transmission speeds up to 2.4G bit/sec and Multi-protocol Label Switching.

As previously reported by Network World, UUNET revealed its plans to deploy MPLS technology in its Internet backbone last month. But the ISP was short on details and was reluctant to say that MPLS would replace ATM - when in fact that is the ultimate plan.

"We'll move everything [in Europe] to MPLS in terms of the core in an early 2000 time frame," says Kevin Boyne, vice president of technology operations at UUNET. In the U.S., UUNET is planning to start its MPLS deployment early next year.

MPLS is an Internet Engineering Task Force technology that lets service providers more efficiently route IP packets over their networks. MPLS uses labels or tags to identify where IP traffic should be sent. These tags are designed to speed the routing process while sending traffic along the most efficient paths across the network.

MPLS will allow UUNET to upgrade its network, over time, up to 10G bit/sec much easier than if the ISP was continuing to support ATM, explains Michael O'Dell, chief scientist at UUNET. "It's a traffic engineering issue," he says.

UUNET is in the process of deploying Juniper Network's M40 Internet Backbone Routers in point-of-presence sites in London, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Upgrades to these cities are expected to be complete in September. Additional routers will be deployed in Paris and Brussels by year-end.

Additional vendors may be used to support MPLS as time goes on, but for now Juniper's routers are the only products UUNET is using to support MPLS, Boyne says.

Today, UUNET's network both in the U.S. and throughout Europe, supports IP over ATM over Sonet, Boyne says. But the plan is to have an IP over MPLS over Sonet network, he adds.

UUNET not will be cutting off its Fore Systems ASX 1000 ATM switches that primarily make up the core of its network, Boyne says. But instead, UUNET will run parallel networks until the Juniper routers are proven. By early 2000, UUNET will most likely move to an all IP over MPLS over Sonet network.

It's true that not only can ATM support MPLS routing, but it can also support higher speeds of traffic. But it's not the ideal scenario when dealing with a very large IP network, O'Dell says.

"ATM will not scale above the 2.4G level," Boyne says. It's not that ATM can't support speeds above 2.4G bit/sec, it becomes very difficult to interface routers and switches at 2.4G or higher, O'Dell says. "To interface between an ATM switch and a router you need a packet interface that performs segmentation and reassembling (SAR). At 10G bit/sec that's really hard to do. When you want to get all 10G's into a single IP stream SAR is a problem," O'Dell says.

By eliminating ATM and using MPLS that process is much easier to support, O'Dell says.

To date, AT&T is the only other service provider that's talked about supporting MPLS. The carrier uses MPLS in its AT&T IP frame relay service.

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