Autonomicity in Virtual Private Network provisioning for enterprises

Abstract

Large enterprises usually require Virtual Private Network (VPN) services provisioned by the network operator. Also, there is an emerging need for supporting multicast communications, i.e. one host communicate with other hosts located in multiple remote sites. While MPLS-based IP VPNs are proven to be scalable, current approaches for extending it with multicast features involve potential state explosion, some bandwidth inefficiencies in the operator network or complex management tasks to find a good balance between forwarding state and bandwidth usage. These properties are direct consequences of the current MPLS and network-layer multicast forwarding approaches, as state should be maintained in the forwarding plane for each tree in each intermediate node. In this paper, we build on a stateless Bloom-filter-based forwarding plane installed in the service provider's network. By moving the state into the packet headers from the nodes, new trade-offs appear due to the probabilistic nature of Bloom filters. We highlight autonomic scenarios, such as self-configuration of addresses, resource management in the network, simple autonomic provisioning of dynamic multicast trees and self-optimization of forwarding performance.