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doubt about implecit NULL label

  • From: Ashish Kulshreshtha <ashishk@mimesw.globespan.net>
  • Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 14:47:45 +0530

Penultimate hop doesn't need to do IP forwarding as it knows the outgoing label for egress. So it will send using that label.
The advantage is that the egress doesn't need to perform a POP operation.
From RFC 3031,
section 3.16......
 

From an architectural perspective, this is perfectly appropriate. The purpose of the level m label is to get the packet to Rn. Once R[n-1] has decided to send the packet to Rn, the label no longer has any function, and need no longer be carried.

There is also a practical advantage to doing penultimate hop popping. If one does not do this, then when the LSP egress receives a packet, it first looks up the top label, and determines as a result of that lookup that it is indeed the LSP egress. Then it must pop the stack, and examine what remains of the packet. If there is another label on the stack, the egress will look this up and forward the packet based on this lookup. (In this case, the egress for the packet's level m LSP is also an intermediate node for its level m-1 LSP.) If there is no other label on the stack, then the packet is forwarded according to its network layer destination address. Note that this would require the egress to do TWO lookups, either two label lookups or a label lookup followed by an address lookup.From an architectural perspective, this is perfectly appropriate. The purpose of the level m label is to get the packet to Rn. Once R[n-1] has decided to send the packet to Rn, the label no longer has any function, and need no longer be carried. There is also a practical advantage to doing penultimate hop popping. If one does not do this, then when the LSP egress receives a packet, it first looks up the top label, and determines as a result of that lookup that it is indeed the LSP egress. Then it must pop the stack, and examine what remains of the packet. If there is another label on the stack, the egress will look this up and forward the packet based on this lookup. (In this case, the egress for the packet's level m LSP is also an intermediate node for its level m-1 LSP.) If there is no other label on the stack, then the packet is forwarded according to its network layer destination address. Note that this would require the egress to do TWO lookups, either two label lookups or a label lookup followed by an address lookup.

 

the text in bold tells that it uses the label of outgoing interface and then POPS  the label.

----- Original Message -----
From: siva Reddy
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 2:11 PM
Subject: doubt about implecit NULL label

Dear all,
when we use implecit NULL (label valu 3) the
penultimate HOP has to pop the label insted of
replacing(swapping).afterwards it will be simply IP
packet only.can penultimate HOP forward the IP packet
to LSR.

please clarify me about this implecit NULL concept.
thanks in adv.
regards
lonka

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