MPLS (JUNIPER NETWORK)

Juniper Router
 PLANES
• Juniper Networks platform
a)control planes
b)forwarding planes within the router.

The Routing Engine and the Packet Forwarding

Engine, respectively, represent these planes.
• The Routing Engine operates all routing
protocols and makes all routing table
decisions, building a master routing
table(INET.0) with the best path to each
destination selected .The router then places
these best paths into the forwarding table on
the Routing Engine and copies that same data
into the forwarding table on the Packet
Forwarding Engine. The forwarding table on
the Packet Forwarding Engine allows the
router to actually forward user data packets.
• The Packet Forwarding Engine is the central
location for data packet forwarding through
the router. In contrast to the Routing Engine
with its single motherboard and processor, the
Packet Forwarding Engine contains a passive
midplane as well as multiple boards and
processors. The main portions of the Packet
Forwarding Engine are the Physical Interface
Card, the Flexible PIC Concentrator, and a
switching control board.
 Free BSD Unix operating system
• The kernel is the heart of the JUNOS software.
The kernel is responsible for operating
multiple daemons that perform the actual
functions of the router
• Software Components
The JUNOS software is actually made up of
multiple pieces working together to control
the router’s functions.
• jkernel
• jbase
• jroute
• jpfe
• jdocs
• jcrypto
• jbundle
• JUNOS software Routing Tables
The JUNOS software provides multiple routing tables
that are used :
• inet.0
• inet.1
• inet.2
• inet.3
• inet.4
• inet6.0
• mpls.0
• bgp.l3vpn.0
• bgp.l2vpn.0

Each of the default tables contains separate route

information
 MPLS
• MPLS is multi protocol label switching
mechanism which uses the label to forward
the traffic to the next hop address
• MPLS uses LDP.LDP uses IGP for label
distribution
• P router doesn’t have Customer network
routes where in PE router is having customer
network routes. Another reason is P router
doesn’t require MP-iBGP but for PE it is must.
• To make your PE router as P, you need to
remove the BGP configurations and after that
it will not participate with customer network.
 MPLS TERMINOLOGY
• For MPLS to run on the routers in the network,
we must enable MPLS and the Resource
Reservation Protocol (RSVP), configure an interior
gateway protocol (IGP) and Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP) to run over the relevant
interfaces, and configure each interface
with the following:
• Basic IP information• MPLS support
• In addition, we must configure a label-switched
path (LSP) from the ingress router to the egress
router.
• We can configure our MPLS network with
either Intermediate System-to-Intermediate
System (IS-IS) or Open Shortest Path First
(OSPF) as the IGP.

• An IGP is required for the Constrained

Shortest Path First (CSPF) LSP, which is the
default with the Junos OS
The IGP is almost needed in all SP networks:
• advertising the loopback IP addresses is a pre-requisite for
signalling plane:
• iBGP uses it
• LDP uses it
• RSVP TE uses it
• L2TPv3 uses it
• When MPLS is used we need a working IPv4 cloud to
exchange label information with LDP or RSVP TE otherwise an
iBGP session state would depend on the state of other iBGP
sessions and this is not desirable from a troubleshooting point
and for more robustness. OSPF or IS-IS are very good in doing
the job of advertising loopbacks and backbone links and they
do it efficiently with fast convergence.
• iBGP sessions can be seen like user traffic flows that use
routing table entries built by IGP and eventually MPLS paths.
 Routing Tables
• Juniper mpls.0 table (LFIB)>show route table
mpls.0
• Juniper RIB Railnet VRF in router >show route
table RAILNET.inet.0
• Juniper FIB> show route forwarding-table
vpn RAILNET
• Labels received from next-hop routers are
also stored in the FEC mapping table (inet.3)
 Labels
• In case of layer 3 VPN, two labels are normally
carried by packet. But the differentiation
between the labels is ipv4 and vpnv4. Ipv4 label
is used for IGP and vpnv4 label is used for
customer route.

• LDP is only responsible for the top most label i.e

IGP label and MP-iBGP is responsible for vpnv4
label
MPLS traffic flow
THANK YOU