2.3.17 Pseudo Wire Emulation Edge to Edge (pwe3)

Last Modified: 2004-07-23

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Description of Working Group:

An alternative approach is to provide multiple services, each as an emulation in a tunnel over an IP packet switched network. There are many proprietary service-specific implementations in in the market now that use this approach. The PSN can transport PDUs for multiple services, and the conversion/interworking functions per service pair are not needed. We term the tunnels used in this approach "pseudo wires" (with no implication that what is emulated is copper or otherwise is restricted to real world wires, but rather with the commonly used metaphorical sense of wire, as when a mobile device designer speaks of the "on the wire" packet formats!)

The basic idea of this working group is to develop standards for the encapsulation and service emulation of pseudo wires: encapsulating service-specific PDUs arriving at an ingress logical port and carrying them across a tunnel, managing their timing, order or other aspects entering and leaving the tunnel, to emulate the behavior and characteristics of the service as well as possible. Applicability statements for each service will describe expected shortfalls of the emulation's faithfulness.

From the customer perspective, the pseudo wire is perceived as an unshared link or circuit (or the appropriate unit) of the chosen service (although it will not be a perfect emulation of the service).

Pseudo wires require the edge devices providing service interfaces to use common service-specific techniques for encapsulating PDUs and maintaining the service characteristics and behavior in the data flow.

The purpose of the WG is to pursue standardization of the framework and the service-specific techniques for pseudo wires.

Assumptions

PWE3 protocols and implementation focus on the edge-to-edge emulation and maintenance of service-specific pseudo-wires. Creation and placement of the tunnels is outside of the scope.

Tunnels for PWE3 encapsulations will use IP (both versions), L2TP, or MPLS. PWE3 will coordinate closely with the L2TP WG and its technologies. PWE3 pseudo wires will have the same specification for all underlying PSNs (i.e. there will not be specific adaptation of a pseudo wire technology for MPLS that is distinct from what is used for IP and L2TP, or differences will be the minimum necessary and will be called out clearly).

PWE3 will not exert controls on the underlying PSN, but only function at the endpoints of the pseudo wire, though the endpoints may be configured to set diffserv codepoints in the tunneling datagrams.

PWE3 will use RTP where necessary to perform clock recovery and other real-time signaling functions. This work will be coordinated with the AVT WG and payloads will follow RFC 2736.

PWE3 will not strive for pseudo wires to perfectly emulate the characteristics of the native service. For each type of pseudo wire, an applicability statement will describe the degree of similarity of a pseudo wire to the native service it emulates.

WG Objectives (in order of priority):

Develop a requirements document to define the specific services and technology to be defined by the working group.

Specify methods with RTP (and possibly using header compression where needed) to ensure in-order final PDU delivery, perform clock recovery inband emulation and maintenance functions across the PSN, where required.

Research the statistics and other network management information needed for tunnel operation and management, for example, to be able to determine when a circuit's up/down state has changed. Coordinate closely with the CCAMP WG on this.

Specify the security mechanisms to be used to protect the control of the PWE3 technology. These are likely to be security mechanisms that are part of the tunnel creation technology and not be developed by PWE3, but cited by PWE3 specifications. Requirements may be ommunicated to the PPVPN, L2TPEXT and CCAMP WGs. The protection of the encapsulated content of the pseudo wire is outside of scope.

The WG will determine the requirements for having a pseudo wire pass across an administrative boundary. An edge could be a native hand-off or hand-off to a further pseudo-wire. The WG may analyze requirements for both security and performance for the inter-administration technology.

Deliverables

General documents:

Requirements Document

Framework Document

Common Edge-to-Edge Emulation/Maintenance Protocol Requirements for PW Traceroute (if distinct from tunnel-specific or CCAMP traceroute).

Individual encapsulation and emulation/maintenance document(s) for each of the following transported protocols, as well as applicability statements for each:

Ethernet (DIX Ethernet (100M, 1G, 10G), IEEE 802.3, 802.1q (VLAN)

Frame Relay

ATM

TDM (e.g. DS1, DS3, SONET)

MPLS (over IP or L2TP only)

Out of Scope

Any multicast service not native to the emulated medium. Thus, Ethernet transmission to a "multicast" IEEE-48 address is in scope, while multicast services like MARS that are implemented on top of the medium are out of scope.

Methods to signal underlying network.

Other Working Groups We Will Coordinate With

L2TPEXT, DIFFSERV, AVT, CCAMP, PPVPN, MPLS, TEWG, ROHC

Goals and Milestones:

Internet-Drafts:

No Request For Comments

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