It may be a good idea to add some mention of the fact that at least currently, IPv6-only networks cannot fully support MPLS. While the draft presents the lack of MPLS as a potential hardware limitation or design choice to avoid MPLS on networks where it is not already present, there are some additional reasons that I think are worth discussing. The operator could have made the design choice to disable IPv4 on their network for ease of management and scale (return to single-stack) or due to an address constraint, where the operator does not possess enough IPv4 address resources to provide IPv4 addressing to the endpoints and other network elements on which they desire to run MPLS, and therefore would require MPLS to support operation on an IPv6-only network. There is work ongoing in the MPLS WG [draft-ietf-mpls-ipv6-only-gap] to catalog the issues that must be addressed before IPv6-only MPLS is fully supported, but since that is only in the gap-analysis phase, it will be some time before IPv6-only MPLS is a reality, so in some ways, I see SPRING over IPv6 as a way to leapfrog this work.
Further, it is worth highlighting that in a dual-stack MPLS-enabled network, by default IPv6 traffic is natively routed, not label-switched, and in order to use MPLS features such as RSPV-TE on IPv6 traffic flows, the traffic must either be encapsulated in a VPN (6VPE) or forced to use the MPLS data plane (6PE). Thus segment routing via MPLS is not a complete solution for IPv6 traffic flows by default. Another suggestion for section 2.5 - provisioning of guaranteed disjoint paths for diversity. Thanks, Wes George Anything below this line has been added by my company’s mail server, I have no control over it. ----------- This E-mail and any of its attachments may contain Time Warner Cable proprietary information, which is privileged, confidential, or subject to copyright belonging to Time Warner Cable. This E-mail is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient of this E-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying, or action taken in relation to the contents of and attachments to this E-mail is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this E-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and permanently delete the original and any copy of this E-mail and any printout. _______________________________________________ spring mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/spring
