15. Scalability

15. Scalability

We have discussed scalability issues throughout this paper. In this section, we briefly summarize the main characteristics of our model with respect to scalability.

The Service Provider backbone network consists of (a) PE routers, (b) BGP Route Reflectors, (c) P routers (that are neither PE routers nor Route Reflectors), and, in the case of multi-provider VPNs, (d) ASBRs.

P routers do not maintain any VPN routes. In order to properly forward VPN traffic, the P routers need only maintain routes to the PE routers and the ASBRs. The use of two levels of labeling is what makes it possible to keep the VPN routes out of the P routers.

A PE router maintains VPN routes, but only for those VPNs to which it is directly attached.

Route reflectors can be partitioned among VPNs so that each partition carries routes for only a subset of the VPNs supported by the Service Provider. Thus, no single route reflector is required to maintain routes for all VPNs.

For inter-provider VPNs, if the ASBRs maintain and distribute VPN-IPv4 routes, then the ASBRs can be partitioned among VPNs in a similar manner, with the result that no single ASBR is required to maintain routes for all the inter-provider VPNs. If multi-hop EBGP is used, then the ASBRs need not maintain and distribute VPN-IPv4 routes at all.

As a result, no single component within the Service Provider network has to maintain all the routes for all the VPNs. So the total capacity of the network to support increasing numbers of VPNs is not limited by the capacity of any individual component.