6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Splendid presentation, November 13, 2001
This review is from: Advanced MPLS Design and Implementation (CCIE Professional Development) (Hardcover)
This is a very nice book. It is well written and organized very well in a structured manner. I also noticed, that one could read the chapter on Traffic Engineering without reading the previous chapters on MPLS VPNs and still get a grasp of the topic under discuion. In this sense, the book is very modular.
I would recommend this book to anyone trying to catch up on MPLS from the scratch. The title indicates that the book is advanced in nature which could frighten the first-time MPLS implementer, but I assure you, that the initial chapters are a warm-up on WAN technology and could serve as a refresher for TDM, Frame Relay and ATM technology.
The author does a wonderful job in terms of the ramp up to advanced topics and has presented the chapter on ATM MPLS very well with screen shots from the BPX product, which I feel are very useful. Frame-mode MPLS is covered as well.
The MPLS Traffic Engineeing examples and case study was very well presented as well. However, the chapter on Optical MPLS was a theory-only chapter and did not have any case studies. As such, I would assume that the topic is either beyond the scope of this book or could be the topic of a future cisco press book.
All in all, a very nice book indeed.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very helpful, October 10, 2001
This review is from: Advanced MPLS Design and Implementation (CCIE Professional Development) (Hardcover)
For those familiar with the basic rudiments of MPLS this book gives an excellent overview of the more advanced aspects of the subject. It is strictly a monograph, as there are no exercises in the book, but it could be used as a classroom textbook if it were supplemented with problem sets. The book is aimed at network engineers and managers, but those interested in the performance modeling of MPLS networks will find the book very useful.
The author begins the book with an elementary overview of MPLS, and why it was invented, namely to allow routers and ATM switches to do forwarding based on the contents of a label, and not route lookup.
In the next chapter, the role of MPLS in cloud technologies like TDM, Frame Relay, and ATM is discussed. The reader is expected to know about these technologies in detail, for only short reviews of each is given. The concept of a forward equivalence class (FEC) is introduced, and conventional layer 3 routing versus MPLS is discussed. The author does not discuss the performance issues involved with using MPLS routing versus ordinary layer 3 routing.
The advantages of using labels to do the forwarding instead of network layer forwarding are addressed in the next chapter on MPLS architecture. The author's treatment is very detailed and readers can expect a deeper understanding of the MPLS node architecture and control plane after finishing this chapter. The author emphasizes the unsuitability of OSPF, IS-IS, IGRP, RIP, and RIPv2 for label-binding information distribution. In addition, the ability of MPLS to detect and prevent routing loops is discussed.
Chapter 4 discusses the use of MPLS to construct VPNs. The author emphasizes the advantages of MPLS VPNs and gives a case study in the next chapter which discusses packet-based MPLS VPNs in more detail. The actual steps one would use to configure router-based MPLS VPNs are given. The most interesting section to me was the one on Internet access over MPLS VPNs.
ATM-based MPLS VPNs are discussed in chapter 6, with the author emphasizing the capability of MPLS of eliminating complexity in IP transport across ATM networks by mapping IP addressing and routing information directly into ATM switching tables. QoS guarantees can still be obtained in deploying MPLS IP VPNs over MPLS-aware ATM backbones. A case study is given of a packet-based MPLS over ATM VPN.
The most important chapter of the book for me was chapter 7, which discusses MPLS traffic engineering. Emphasizing the need for doing traffic engineering on the Internet, the author views it as a collection of autonomous systems communicating with each other via EGP. Emphasis is placed on the use of traffic engineering to optimize the traffic flow across the service-providers backbone using techniques such as OSPF and EIGRP unequal-cost load balancing. Noting that these metric manipulation techniques do not provide dynamic redundancy, and do not consider network capacity constraints, the author then discusses the advantages of doing MPLS traffic engineering. And again, the author shows explicitly how to configure devices to support MPLS traffic engineering. Configuration case studies are given for an MPLS traffic-engineered IS-IS network and an OSPF network. The chapter was somewhat disappointing in that there was no discussion on the performance issues involved with employing MPLS traffic engineering.
MPLS QoS is discussed in the next chapter, with emphasis on MPLS implementation of DiffServ and the MPLS VPN QoS pipe and hose models. In the pipe model, the service provider gives the customer a QoS guarantee for traffic flows between two CE routers in the same VPN; in the hose model, the provider gives the customer guarantees for the traffic that a CE router would send/receive from other CE routers in the same VPN. An MPLS QoS case study is given.
Chapter 9 addresses the design issues in implementing and migrating to MPLS, including VPN design and topologies, and ATM networks. The author briefly discusses how to estimate the unidirectional and bi-directional traffic matrices, how to calculate estimated link bandwidths, and how to do MPLS LVC sizing. A lot more however needs to be done from a modeling standpoint in the design phase, so as to raise the level of confidence in the design engineers' mind as to the resilience and performance of the MPLS design.
The last chapter covers the more exotic architectures that are currently being considered for MPLS implementation. These include Dense Division Wavelength Multiplexing (DWDM), which is a process of multiplexing signals of different wavelengths onto a single fiber, and Multiprotocol Lamda Switching, which is the optical analogue of MPLS. In addition, the capability of extending the control plane to the optical layer using the Unified Control Plane (UCP) is discussed. The UCP is a kind of distributed intelligence that includes the optical network elements. The UCP overlay model, which uses two distinct control planes, and the UCP peer model , which only has one, are briefly discussed.
One can thus gain a lot from the reading of this book, but because MPLS is relatively new in the networking world, it is imperative for network designers to be able to experiment with different MPLS configurations in a laboratory and simulation setting. These issues are not addressed in this book, but one can use the information in the book as an adequate guide to assist in these important design activities.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very good reference guide for MPLS, November 5, 2001
This review is from: Advanced MPLS Design and Implementation (CCIE Professional Development) (Hardcover)
It took me 3 solid days to read this book, since we have a major MPLS project coming up. It is very well written and the examples take you from the basics to the advanced. The more advanced content, I noticed was in the ATM and Traffic Engineering sections.
This is the only MPLS book which covers ATM MPLS, none of the other books, I have purchased, including the other Cisco Press book covers ATM MPLS or Traffic Engineering. There are a few typos, which one can live with, However, all in all, it is an excellent MPLS reference and tutorial. I would give it 5 stars.
Chris Beckett
Senior Network Engineer
AT&T
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