Terms and Acronyms

• virtual private LAN service (VPLS)—An Ethernet-based multipoint-to-multipoint Layer 2 VPN service used for interconnecting multiple Ethernet LANs across an MPLS backbone. BGP-based VPLS is based on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet draft draft-ietf-l2vpn-vpls-bgp-08.txt, Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) Using BGP for Auto-discovery and Signaling (expires December 2006). LDP-based VPLS is specified in the IETF draft Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) Using Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) Signaling. For more information about VPLS, see the JUNOS VPNs Configuration Guide.
• virtual port—A special logical interface that is generated dynamically when you configure VPLS on a PE router. Virtual ports send and receive VPLS traffic for remote PE routers as if the remote VPLS sites had Ethernet-based interfaces directly connected to the local PE router. To generate virtual ports, VPLS PE routing platforms use logical interfaces on a vt interface (that is generated by the Tunnel Services PIC, Link Services PIC, Adaptive Services PIC, an LSI interface, or a tunnel services interface configured on MX-series routers.)