Abstract: “The main advantage for taking this proposed approach is that it is a protocol and application agnostic. This will not only work for MPLS, but also for other tunneling protocols such as GRE, or L2TP. It will also work for L2 protocols such as PBB, and applications such as VPLS. Variants such as Nested LSPs are handled as well in the same manner. Our goal is to make the switch as protocol/application unaware as possible. Instead the protocol and applications reside in the controller only. Our Specification is Implementation independent (aka Platform Independent), as a specification should be. At the same time, we do leverage our extensive experience with implementations to make sure that our specification is not devised in vacuum. We have gone to pains to make sure that the implementations will have the flexibility to address their own specific constraints and optimizations while working within the boundaries of the specification.”

Keywords: MPLS, Open Flow Switch, SDN.