Use of mLDP in OISM

Inclusive provider tunnels of type mLDP are supported in OISM PEs. These tunnels can be used to transport multicast flows from root PEs to leaf PEs while preventing multiple copies of the same multicast packet on the same link.

Figure 1 illustrates the difference between using Ingress Replication (IR) and inclusive mLDP provider tunnels in OISM. With a source S1 connected to BD1 and sending a flow to G1, if IR is used, the multicast traffic is only sent to PEs with receivers for (S1,G1). However, if an inclusive mLDP tunnel on PE1 is used (right side of Figure 1) the multicast flow is sent to all the PEs in the tenant domain. For example, PE3 receives the flow only to drop it because there are no local receivers.

Figure 1. OISM with IR versus Inclusive mLDP

mLDP tunnels are referred to as Inclusive BUM tunnels, because, although IP multicast traffic uses these tunnels, any BUM frame is also distributed to all PEs in the tenant. For example, in Figure 1 (right hand side), any BUM frame generated by any host connected to BD1 in PE1 uses the mLDP tunnel and is also sent to PE3.

The use of mLDP-inclusive provider tunnels in OISM requires the following configuration and procedures to be enabled on the PEs.

Assuming the above guidelines are followed, and as illustrated in Figure 1 (right side), the root PE (PE1) that is attached to the source in BD1 sends the multicast traffic in an mLDP tree that is joined by leaf PEs either on BD1 (if BD1 is exists) or on the SBD (if BD1 does not exist on the leaf PE).