Packet Forwarding Component
The packet forwarding component of the JUNOS traffic engineering architecture is MPLS, which is responsible for directing a flow of IP packets along a predetermined path across a network. This path is called a label-switched path (LSP). LSPs are simplex; that is, the traffic flows in one direction from the head-end (ingress) router to a tail-end (egress) router. Duplex traffic requires two LSPs: one LSP to carry traffic in each direction. An LSP is created by the concatenation of one or more label-switched hops, allowing a packet to be forwarded from one router to another across the MPLS domain.
When an ingress router receives an IP packet, it adds an MPLS header to the packet and forwards it to the next router in the LSP. The labeled packet is forwarded along the LSP by each router until it reaches the tail end of the LSP, the egress router. At this point the MPLS header is removed, and the packet is forwarded based on Layer 3 information such as the IP destination address. The value of this scheme is that the physical path of the LSP is not limited to what the IGP would choose as the shortest path to reach the destination IP address.
This section discusses the following topics:
Packet Forwarding Based on Label Swapping
The packet forwarding process at each router is based on the concept of label swapping. This concept is similar to what occurs at each ATM switch in a permanent virtual circuit (PVC). Each MPLS packet carries a 4-byte encapsulation header that contains a 20-bit, fixed-length label field. When a packet containing a label arrives at a router, the router examines the label and copies it as an index to its MPLS forwarding table. Each entry in the forwarding table contains an interface-inbound label pair mapped to a set of forwarding information that is applied to all packets arriving on the specific interface with the same inbound label.
How a Packet Traverses an MPLS Backbone
This section describes how an IP packet is processed as it traverses an MPLS backbone network.
At the entry edge of the MPLS backbone, the IP header is examined by the ingress router. Based on this analysis, the packet is classified, assigned a label, encapsulated in an MPLS header, and forwarded toward the next hop in the LSP. MPLS provides a high degree of flexibility in the way that an IP packet can be assigned to an LSP. For example, in the JUNOS traffic engineering implementation, all packets arriving at the ingress router that are destined to exit the MPLS domain at the same egress router are forwarded along the same LSP.
Once the packet begins to traverse the LSP, each router uses the label to make the forwarding decision. The MPLS forwarding decision is made independently of the original IP header: the incoming interface and label are used as lookup keys into the MPLS forwarding table. The old label is replaced with a new label, and the packet is forwarded to the next hop along the LSP. This process is repeated at each router in the LSP until the packet reaches the egress router.
When the packet arrives at the egress router, the label is removed and the packet exits the MPLS domain. The packet is then forwarded based on the destination IP address contained in the packet's original IP header according to the traditional shortest path calculated by the IP routing protocol.