Interdomain VPLS and Deployment Experiences

The main objective of emergent standard Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) is the interconnection of users located at different geographic locations as if they were in the same local area network. In this sense, the investigations and tests that have been done are mainly focused on point-to-point interconnection scenarios using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), as there have been few tests done up until now in academic and research networks with multipoint scenarios and they have been done mainly within the same domain, but not between different domains. In this paper, we describe the process to put in production VPLS service for testing purposes in an interprovider environment, doing initial tests on a real scenario. With it, one hopes to verify its behaviour in a real production network, analysing the benefits that can be provided to the customers, especially with respect to advanced applications and distributed computing, as it is the case in Grid applications.