10. ARP and ND

10. ARP and ND

The IP Address field in the MAC/IP Advertisement route may optionally carry one of the IP addresses associated with the MAC address. This provides an option that can be used to minimize the flooding of ARP or Neighbor Discovery (ND) messages over the MPLS network and to remote CEs. This option also minimizes ARP (or ND) message processing on end-stations/hosts connected to the EVPN network. A PE may learn the IP address associated with a MAC address in the control or management plane between the CE and the PE. Or, it may learn this binding by snooping certain messages to or from a CE. When a PE learns the IP address associated with a MAC address of a locally connected CE, it may advertise this address to other PEs by including it in the MAC/IP Advertisement route. The IP address may be an IPv4 address encoded using 4 octets or an IPv6 address encoded using 16 octets. For ARP and ND purposes, the IP Address Length field MUST be set to 32 for an IPv4 address or 128 for an IPv6 address.

If there are multiple IP addresses associated with a MAC address, then multiple MAC/IP Advertisement routes MUST be generated, one for each IP address. For instance, this may be the case when there are both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address associated with the same MAC address for dual-IP-stack scenarios. When the IP address is dissociated with the MAC address, then the MAC/IP Advertisement route with that particular IP address MUST be withdrawn.

Note that a MAC-only route can be advertised along with, but independent from, a MAC/IP route for scenarios where the MAC learning over an access network/node is done in the data plane and independent from ARP snooping that generates a MAC/IP route. In such scenarios, when the ARP entry times out and causes the MAC/IP to be withdrawn, then the MAC information will not be lost. In scenarios where the host MAC/IP is learned via the management or control plane, then the sender PE may only generate and advertise the MAC/IP route. If the receiving PE receives both the MAC-only route and the MAC/IP route, then when it receives a withdraw message for the MAC/IP route, it MUST delete the corresponding entry from the ARP table but not the MAC entry from the MAC-VRF table, unless it receives a withdraw message for the MAC-only route.

When a PE receives an ARP Request for an IP address from a CE, and if the PE has the MAC address binding for that IP address, the PE SHOULD perform ARP proxy by responding to the ARP Request.