The objective of this talk is to discuss resiliency and fault tolerance in a MPLS network. A MPLS network needs to be resilient in the wake of link, node and control plane failures. In particular MPLS traffic should not be disrupted due to control plane failures.

The talk focusses on LDP and BGP-MPLS graceful restart mechanisms that have garnered a fair amount of interest lately. Assumptions made with respect to state preserved across control plane failure will be described. The protocol extensions and operations needed to support graceful restart will be discussed along with deployment and implementation considerations.

Rahul Aggarwal is a Software Engineer in the SmartEdge IP routing group at Redback Networks, which he joined in March 2000. He is one of the leading architects and developers of the MPLS implementation on the SmartEdge 800 Router. He is currently contributing to the design and development of MPLS Traffic Engineering, Layer 3 and Layer 2 VPNs.

Prior to joining Redback Networks, he was at Fore Systems between 1998 and 2000, where he worked on the development of OSPF, MPLS and Traffic Engineering. He received a B.E. in Electronics and Communication from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee in 1996. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from University of Minnesota in 1998. His Graduate Research was focussed on QoS and stored video delivery across resource constrained networks.

His professional interests include routing and signaling development, IP and MPLS system and forwarding design, packet classification, VPNs, QoS and Traffic Engineering.