RFC 4928: Avoiding Equal Cost Multipath Treatment in MPLS Networks
In plain English — editorial summary, not part of the RFC
This document describes the Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) behavior of currently deployed MPLS networks. This document makes best practice recommendations for anyone defining an application to run over an MPLS network that wishes to avoid the reordering that can result from transmission of different packets from the same flow over multiple different equal cost paths. These recommendations rely on inspection of the IP version number field in packets. Despite the heuristic nature of the recommendations, they provide a relatively safe way to operate MPLS networks, even if future allocations of IP version numbers were made for some purpose. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
Document record
- Document ID
- RFC4928
- Published
- June 2007
- Authors
- G. Swallow; S. Bryant; L. Andersson
- Status
- BEST CURRENT PRACTICE
- Stream
- IETF
- Area
- rtg
- Pages
- 8
- Also known as
- BCP128
Topics
Referenced by
2 later RFCs formally update or obsolete part of this document.
Related documents
Ranked automatically by shared keywords, IETF area and stream — not by editorial selection.
- RFC 6790The Use of Entropy Labels in MPLS ForwardingUpdated
November 2012
- RFC 7190Use of Multipath with MPLS and MPLS Transport Profile (MPLS-TP)Current
March 2014
- RFC 7226Requirements for Advanced Multipath in MPLS NetworksCurrent
May 2014
- RFC 7325MPLS Forwarding Compliance and Performance RequirementsCurrent
August 2014
- RFC 7510Encapsulating MPLS in UDPCurrent
April 2015
- RFC 7938Use of BGP for Routing in Large-Scale Data CentersCurrent
August 2016
- RFC 8469Recommendation to Use the Ethernet Control WordCurrent
November 2018
- RFC 9262Tree Engineering for Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER-TE)Current
October 2022
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The document record above — title, authors, date, status, stream, area, relationships, DOI and errata — is imported verbatim from the public RFC Editor index. The “in plain English” section is editorial: written by The metasystema editorial team, not part of the RFC. Where the two differ, the RFC text governs.
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