MPLS Backbone: For Technical Audiences (Course N-MPLS)

It’s Now@Web™, a Self-study Course Available 24/7! Recording of Course Taught LIVE on Oct 28-29, 2009 with Two-Way Interactivity
Duration:6 Hours

Target Audience, Prerequisites, and Brief Description

This one day course is aimed at telecommunications professionals who wish to develop a deeper understanding of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), related issues, and the competition.

MPLS is rapidly becoming a must-offer technology for network providers and a must-have service for network users for one main reason: properly engineered MPLS systems offer a previously-unavailable Quality of Service (QoS) that translates into a predictable end-user Quality of Experience (QoE).  The course will help you better understand MPLS, both its fact and fiction, and get a realistic grasp of other technologies that can compete with MPLS for user’s attention, loyalty, and revenues. Taking advantage of the interactive WebLive™ system, plenty of time will be allowed for audience polling, Q/A, and other interaction.

Meet the Presenter: James P. Cavanagh

james-cavanagh.pngJames P. Cavanagh, a Principal Member of the Eogogics Telecommunications Faculty, spends most of his waking hours helping clients understand how they can cost- effectively and securely harness the rapidly growing power of IP-based services and how they can future-proof their communications. His clients include government agencies, service providers, carriers, and others.

Responsible for teaching the Eogogics courses on NGN, IMS, EoIP, SIP, VoIP, Mobile IP, IPSec, IPV6, MPLS, SNMP, and other networking technologies, he is renowned for his ability to explain complex ideas in terms that are easy to understand as well as entertaining and allows them to be put to work immediately. His rich career has spanned X.25 and ISDN to Web 2.0 and Unified Communications. He has written or edited half dozen books and hundreds of articles and white papers. He has designed very local and very global networks for organizations ranging from schools and universities to international energy giants.  Jim is more eager than ever to leverage Eogogics’s bidirectional WebLive™ platform to continue the ongoing conversation on these very important and still evolving topics. Read detailed bio…

 

Detailed Course Outline

  • The MPLS “Family”: MPLS, GMPLS and VPLS
    • What’s So Special About MPLS, Anyway?
    • Quality of Service (QoS) Issues
    • Network Scalability
    • Route Prioritization and Optimization
    • Virtual Private Network (VPN) Issues
  • MPLS: Quick Overview
    • Basic Operation
    • Forwarding Equivalence Class (FEC)
    • Label Marking, Distribution and Binding
    • Label Distribution and Signaling
    • Routing of Label Switch Paths
    • Label Distribution
      • Label Distribution Protocol (LDP)
      • Constraint-Based Label Distribution Protocol
      • LDP Overview
      • Label Retention Modes
    • MPLS-Traffic Engineering
      • RSVP Overview
      • RSVP and MPLS Traffic Engineering
  • MPLS and Lower Layers
  • MPLS End-to-End Example
  • MPLS Quality of Service (QoS)
    • Big Bandwidth vs Managed Bandwidth
    • MPLS QoS/QoE Mechanisms
  • MPLS Life Cycle and the Pendulum of Complexity
  • MPLS Decision Points
    • Adopting Organization
    • Geographic Considerations
    • Service Management
    • MPLS Pros and Cons
  • [Realistic] Alternatives to MPLS
    • IP VPN (L3)
    • Layer 2 Tunneled VPNs
    • Ethernet over VPLS
    • Provider Backbone Transport/Provider Backbone Bridging
  • Course Wrap-up: Recap, Q/A, Learning More about MPLS