A path from 6PE to 4PE

Segment-Routing and MPLS for IPv4/IPv6 Control-plane interoperability

Posted by nmodena on Thursday, April 4, 2024

This year at #ITNOG8 I presented “interoperability (and migration) from an ipv4 to ipv6-only core with SR-MPLS”, my analysis of a role reversal path, from a single stack ipv4-only backbone that provides ipv6 services via 6PE/6VPE towards a ipv6-only backbone with 4PE and 4VPE for IPv4, whose constant is MPLS.

I showed how, by appropriately directing the evolution of the control plane, this migration can be extremely simple and above all transparent.

There was not enough time for the backup slide, where I also analyze seamless mpls architectures, which in this case can be very useful for evolving or integrating new exclusively ipv6 regions, and showing some doubts about the validity of the current state of SRv6 for the creation of these infrastructures.

The comparisons and comments received during the two days of the meeting made me understand that there is a great need for presentations like these, which seek to share and bring independent and reasoned points of view on a possible evolution of network architectures.

Reviewers

I thank ITNOG for hosting me and Ivan Pepelnjak and Massimo Magnani for the review.

Presentation

The full presentation it’s available on my GitHub Repository