Paragon Planner P2MP Traffic Engineering Overview

Traditionally, high-quality video transmissions have been carried over either SDH/SONET or ATM where the bandwidth can be guaranteed. However, the drive towards converged networks requires that these signals must be carried over the carrier’s IP/MPLS network. Layer-3 IP multicast using PIM is adequate only for IP TV which has a low customer price and corresponding customer expectations, and is not suitable for high-quality video transmissions which have strict SLAs for packet loss and jitter.

Point-to-multipoint (P2MP) traffic engineering solutions have been developed in the IETF and are now deployed commercially in production networks. P2MP traffic engineering allows for efficient traffic replication in the network, and offers many RSVP-TE features – including explicit path specification and bandwidth specification -- available for point-to-point LSPs.

Paragon Planner fully supports P2MP MPLS-TE tunnels for IP/MPLS networks. There’s ongoing work in the IETF in areas such as P2MP resiliency, scalability, multicast VPN integration. As new P2MP features become available in production networks, Juniper Networks will continue to enhance Paragon Planner’s P2MP features support.

The following sections of this chapter describe the P2MP features that are currently supported by Paragon Planner.

Use these procedures if you have P2MP configured in your network or if you would like to use Paragon Planner to help you model P2MP LSP tunnels.

If you wish to perform these tasks in Paragon Planner, you should have an IP/MPLS network router specification file open before you begin. Otherwise, you should have a set of router configuration files ready to be imported into the tool. The chapter assumes the user is familiar with IP, MPLS, traffic engineering, P2MP concepts and terminology, and IP multicast PIM concepts and terminology.