2nd International ICST Conference on Broadband Networks

Research Article

Tunneling techniques for end-to-end VPNs: generic deployment in an optical testbed environment

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/ICBN.2005.1589696,
        author={Tarek Saad and Basel Alawieh and Semra Gulder and Hussein T. Mouftah},
        title={Tunneling techniques for end-to-end VPNs: generic deployment in an optical testbed environment},
        proceedings={2nd International ICST Conference on Broadband Networks},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={BROADNETS},
        year={2006},
        month={2},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1109/ICBN.2005.1589696}
    }
    
  • Tarek Saad
    Basel Alawieh
    Semra Gulder
    Hussein T. Mouftah
    Year: 2006
    Tunneling techniques for end-to-end VPNs: generic deployment in an optical testbed environment
    BROADNETS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/ICBN.2005.1589696
Tarek Saad1,*, Basel Alawieh1,*, Semra Gulder2,*, Hussein T. Mouftah1,*
  • 1: Optical Networks Research Lab, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
  • 2: Communications Research Centre Canada, Ottawa, Canada
*Contact email: tsaad@site.uottawa.ca , balawieh@site.uottawa.ca , semra.gulder@crc.ca, mouftah@site.uottawa.ca

Abstract

Service providers today are constantly seeking to offer multiple services on a single common infrastructure. For instance, it is desirable sometimes to provide transport services transparently to data traffic encapsulated over different network layers. Tunneling is a technique for encapsulating a packet or frame within another packet of the same or a different network layer. One of the motivations for tunneling is bridging various heterogeneous networks that use different protocols for communication. Tunneling is also used for providing private and secure communications over a publicly shared network. This article investigates the interactions between different tunneling technologies in order to provide end-to-end virtual connectivity to end clients. Particularly, the article describes the technical details of the implementation of various layer-2 tunneling techniques-such as L2TP, GRE, and MPLS-based tunnels- in order to establish an end-to-end virtual connection-service as a concatenation of services offered by the different network domains along the path between end users