Support for Virtual Transport Network (VTN) in the Path Computation Element Communication Protocol (PCEP)
draft-dong-pce-pcep-vtn-01

Abstract

With the introduction and evolvement of 5G and other network scenarios, some existing or new customers may require connectivity services with advanced characteristics comparing to traditional Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Such kind of network service is called enhanced VPNs (VPN+). The typical application of VPN+ is to provide network slice services. A Virtual Transport Network (VTN) is a virtual underlay network which consists of a set of dedicated or shared network resources allocated from the physical underlay network, and is associated with a customized logical network topology. VPN+ services can be delivered by mapping one or a group of overlay VPNs to the appropriate VTNs as the virtual underlay. Then traffic flows of the VPN+ service can be steered onto the TE paths within the VTN. The Path Computation Element (PCE) provides path computation functions in support of traffic engineering in Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS), Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) and Segment Routing (SR) networks. This document specifies the extensions to PCE communication Protocol (PCEP) to carry VTN information in the PCEP messages. The extensions in this document can be used in the basic PCE computation, the stateful PCE and the PCE-initiated LSP mechanisms to indicate path computation, path status report and path initialization within a specific VTN.

Authors

Jie Dong
Sheng Fang
Liuyan Han
Minxue Wang

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