SR-MPLS Traffic Engineering Lab
Advanced Configuration Lab
Solution overview
Segment Routing Traffic Engineering or SR-MPLS Traffic Engineering adds an entirely new dimension to Segment Routing. Traffic Engineering has been around for many years as RSVP-TE; however, being very cumbersome and complex, it has gained very little popularity with few deployments. The advent of SR-MPLS TE has opened the door to vast possibilities with Traffic Engineering by dramatically simplifying the implementation, removing the state from the network, and placing it in the packet.
This lab provides a hands-on environment with Cisco XRv9000 routers to demonstrate some of the primary use cases of SR-MPLS Traffic Engineering. We will explore basic SR-MPLS Traffic Engineering with both explicit paths and dynamic paths using ODN-AS or On-demand Next-hop with Automated Steering. BGP Color communities are used to tag prefixes for Traffic Engineering. In addition, an SR PCE or Path Computation Element is utilized to do centralized Traffic Engineering. The SR PCE functionality runs natively on IOS XR and does not require any additional hardware; however, we will use a dedicated BGP Route Reflector to perform the SR PCE functionality.