New Tunneling Capabilities for BGP/MPLS IP VPN in GNU/Linux

In this paper we present an implementation and validation tests that allow a GNU/Linux node act as a PE router in a BGP/MPLS IP VPN architecture. Precisely, this implementation supports all the mandatory capabilities defined in RFC 4364 with regard to the data forwarding plane, such as VRFs to separate the traffic from different VPNs, MPLS to manage the VPN routes at PE nodes and MPLS tunnels for the communication between PEs. Moreover, this basic implementation is extended to support the operation defined in RFC 4797, which allows other lands of tunnel technologies to be used between PE nodes. We provide configuration examples for both cases, and finally complete the study with the addition of IPsec options to the PE-PE GRE tunnel communication.