Subject: Protocol Action: Link Bundling in MPLS Traffic Engineering to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 18:11:11 -0500

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The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft Link Bundling in MPLS 
Traffic Engineering <draft-ietf-mpls-bundle-04.txt> as a Proposed 
Standard. This document is the product of the Multiprotocol Label 
Switching Working Group.  The IESG contact persons are Bert Wijnen 
and Scott Bradner.

Technical Summary

A MPLS Traffic Engineering (TE) link is a logical construct that
represents a way to group/map the information about certain physical
resources (and their properties) that interconnect Label Switch Routers
into the information that is used by Constrained SPF for the purpose of
path computation, and by GMPLS signaling.

Depending on the nature of resources that form a particular MPLS TE 
link, for the purpose of GMPLS signaling in some cases a combination of 
<link identifier, label> is sufficient to unambiguously identify the 
appropriate resource used by an Label Switched Path. In other cases, a 
combination of <link identifier, label> is not sufficient. The latter 
cases are handled by using the link bundling construct that is described 
in this document.

Working Group Summary

The MPLS working group supported publication of this document.

Protocol Quality

This document was reviewed for the IESG by Scott Bradner.

RFC Editor: 

Insert the following paragraph after the second paragraph in Section 4 
(Link Bundling):

As an example consider a TE link between a pair of SONET/SDH cross 
connects, where this TE link is composed of several fibers. In 
this case the label is a TDM time slot, and moreover, this time 
slot is significant only within a particular fiber. Thus, when 
signaling an LSP over such a TE link, one needs to specify not just 
the identity of the link, but also the identity of a particular 
fiber within that TE link, as well as a particular label (time 
slot) within that fiber.