Multilink bundles can have from one to eight members (ports) specified. The bundles aggregate channelized ports which define available bandwidth to carry data over a DS1 channel. 56 multilink bundles can be configured per MDA. 256 MLPPP groups are supported per ASAP MDA. Each bundle represents a single connection between two routers.
Multilink bundling is based on a link control protocol (LCP) option negotiation that allows a system to indicate to its peer that it is capable of combining multiple physical links into a bundle.
Multilink bundling operations are modeled after a virtual PPP link-layer entity where packets received over different physical link-layer entities are identified as belonging to a separate PPP network protocol (the Multilink Protocol, or MP) and recombined and sequenced according to information present in a multilink fragmentation header. All packets received over links identified as belonging to the multilink arrangement are presented to the same network-layer protocol processing machine, whether they have multilink headers or not.
When you configure multilink bundles, consider the following guidelines:
Multilink bundle configuration should include at least two ports.
A maximum of eight ports can be included in a multilink bundle.
Multilink bundles can only be aggregated on a single MDA.
A:ALA-A>config# port bundle-5/2.1
A:ALA-A>config>port# multilink-bundle
A:ALA-A>config>port>ml-bundle# member 5/2/1.ds0grp-1.1
A:ALA-A>config>port>ml-bundle# member 5/2/1.ds0grp-2.2
A:ALA-A>config>port>ml-bundle# member 5/2/1.ds0grp-1.1