Re: [mpls] MPLS-RT review of draft-bryant-mpls-sfl-framework-04

[Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]>]

On 11/05/2017 16:04, Eric C Rosen wrote:
> On 5/10/2017 7:00 AM, Bocci, Matthew (Nokia - GB) wrote:
>> The EL is effectively saying “all other things being equal, here is 
>> some additional information to distinguish flows”. It is in addition 
>> to, but not an alternative to the rest of the label stack.
>
> Do you think there is any situation in which (a) one has given the 
> same EL value to two packets, but (b) one would be perfectly happy to 
> see the packets delivered out of order?   Or to put it another way, 
> once an ingress node has assigned a particular EL value to a 
> particular set of packets, is there any advantage to including other 
> fields in the ECMP hash?

I think not, and thus was surprised when I found out that EL did not of 
itself define the flow to the forwarders. Clearly I should have read RFC

>
>> I don’t think that it is reasonable to mandate that LSRs only 
>> consider the EL and ignore all other labels in the stack given the 
>> impact on the deployed base
>
> Certainly one cannot mandate the deployed base to be other than it is, 
> but it would be interesting to know whether the common implementation 
> is really the preferred behavior.
>
>

As we do more with MPLS it seems to me that we would like the EL to set 
the path for the flow, with other labels being ignored. Aborting the 
hash calculation on finding an ELI and just using the next label is 
simple operation, simpler than for example skipping the SPLs, and in the 
case of an extended SPL and the label that follows.

- Stewart

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>