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Indispensable Notes On Virtual Private LAN Services VPLS

Indispensable Notes On Virtual Private LAN Services VPLS

By Terrence Thomas.

For most part the evolution of networks has been driven by the need for better connectivity from the customers. Enterprise customers have been always driving service providers to provide better and faster solutions to connect their offices with each other. The most recent demands have been the ability to connect each branch with the others in a mesh like network. The Virtual Private LAN Services - VPLS solutions are ideal to meet these demands.

Traditionally, most organizations have a single head office and a handful of smaller offices scattered around. The primary aim of inter-branch connectivity was to connect all smaller branches to the head office. As the networks grew, the number of branches grew, but the topology remains a hub and spoke kind of solution.

With rising property rates, growing complexities in business and growing local customers, relaying everything to head office is not feasible for businesses anymore. They need all the branches to talk to all other branches as much as possible. This really means a core network architecture that can support multipoint to multipoint connectivity.

LAN solutions have always been the best for multipoint solutions. Since they were invented, they have been perfected to handle high speed data for varying number of nodes effectively and efficiently. They can adapt the link rates dynamically and adding or deleting nodes in the LANs is not a problem at all. This is the reason why many enterprises prefer to stick to a similar solution for their multipoint needs too.

VPLS is a perfect solution to provide the enterprises with a LAN like solution across the service provider network. Running over the IP/MPLS core, it can be used to connect multiple branches to multiple branches through dedicated tunnels. The IP/MPLS solutions can support as high as 1 Gbps to 10 Gpbs link speeds too.

In this type of architecture, the provider edge (PE) router looks up the VLAN of the packet and tags it with the respective virtual circuit details. The packet is then passed through the core networks over LSP tunnels to reach the destination PE router which forwards the packet to the customer equipment within the enterprise LAN.

Thus it helps extend the local LAN connectivity across the service provider core to remote branches giving the enterprises extended LAN coverage. Previously, this would require a WAN connection between the offices. The WAN links were generally of much lower speeds than the LAN due to the distance constraints.

With the advancement in technology, and better standards we can now achieve long distance services over Ethernet or LAN based solutions. This is a direct consequence of these developments. Now all corporate offices can work as if they are all collocated in the same LAN with VPLS solutions.