RFC 3612 (rfc3612) - Page 2 of 16
Applicability Statement for Restart Mechanisms for the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP)
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 3612 Applicability for LDP Restart Mechanisms September 2003
2. Requirements of an LDP FT System
Many MPLS LSRs may exploit FT hardware or software to provide high
availability (HA) of core networks. In order to provide HA, an MPLS
system needs to be able to survive a variety of faults with minimal
disruption to the Data Plane, including the following fault types:
- failure/hot-swap of the switching fabric in an LSR,
- failure/hot-swap of a physical connection between LSRs,
- failure of the TCP or LDP stack in an LSR,
- software upgrade to the TCP or LDP stacks in an LSR.
The first two examples of faults listed above may be confined to the
Data Plane. Such faults can be handled by providing redundancy in
the Data Plane which is transparent to LDP operating in the Control
Plane. However, the failure of the switching fabric or a physical
link may have repercussions in the Control Plane since signaling may
be disrupted.
The third example may be caused by a variety of events including
processor or other hardware failure, and software failure.
Any of the last three examples may impact the Control Plane and will
require action in the Control Plane to recover. Such action should
be designed to avoid disrupting traffic in the Data Plane. Since
many recent router architectures can separate the Control and Data
Planes, it is possible that forwarding can continue unaffected by
recovery action in the Control Plane.
In other scenarios, the Data and Control Planes may be impacted by a
fault, but the needs of HA require the coordinated recovery of the
Data and Control Planes to a state that existed before the fault.
The provision of protection paths for MPLS LSP and the protection of
links, IP routes or tunnels through the use of protection LSPs is
outside the scope of this document. See [RFC 3469] for further
information.
3. General Considerations
In order for the Data and Control Plane states to be successfully
recovered after a fault, procedures are required to ensure that the
state held on a pair of LDP peers (at least one of which was affected
Farrel Informational