What is LDP extended discovery?

Normally LDP neighbors are found automatically by sending UDP Hello packets on Port 646 with the destination of multicast address 224.0.0.2 out of each LDP enabled interface.

In some MPLS applications a LDP session must be established between non directly connected peers to exchange labels. In such cases Hello packets can not be just broadcasted, instead these Hello packets are sent as unicast packets using UDP on port 646 and destined to the targeted peer.

AToM and TE are examples of these applications that require an targeted LDP session between non directly connected routers.

The command mpls ldp neighbor [vrf vpn-name] ip-addr targeted [ldp | tdp] can be used to manually configure targeted LDP sessions between peers.

Note: In the AToM and TE cases you don’t need to use the previous command because the session will be established automatically after adding the service required configuration.

Configuration example:

BB-PE1(config)#mpls ldp neighbor 100.100.253.2 targeted ldp

BB-PE1#sh mpls ldp neighbor 100.100.253.2 det
    Peer LDP Ident: 100.100.253.2:0; Local LDP Ident 100.100.253.1:0
        TCP connection: 100.100.253.2.25316 - 100.100.253.1.646
        Password: not required, none, in use
        State: Oper; Msgs sent/rcvd: 12/12; Downstream; Last TIB rev sent 17
        Up time: 00:01:30; UID: 3; Peer Id 1;
        LDP discovery sources:
          Targeted Hello 100.100.253.1 -> 100.100.253.2, active, passive;
            holdtime: infinite, hello interval: 10000 ms
        Addresses bound to peer LDP Ident:
          100.100.29.1    100.100.253.2
        Peer holdtime: 180000 ms; KA interval: 60000 ms; Peer state: estab
        Clients: Dir Adj Client

!-- Small Part of the LIB table showing the label exchange between the peers
BB-PE1#sh mpls ldp binding
  lib entry: 100.100.19.0/24, rev 6
        local binding:  label: imp-null
        remote binding: lsr: 100.100.253.2:0, label: 16
  lib entry: 100.100.19.1/32, rev 17
        remote binding: lsr: 100.100.253.2:0, label: 17
  lib entry: 100.100.19.2/32, rev 4
        local binding:  label: 16
        remote binding: lsr: 100.100.253.2:0, label: 21

Related posts:

  1. LDP neighbor discovery, session establishment and maintenance
  2. What is: extended VLAN range?
  3. What is: AToM Control-Word?
  4. Option 2 (10B): ASBR-to-ASBR / MP-eBGP for VPNv4 – Inter-AS MPLS VPN – The whole story (3) – Updated Dec 2008
  5. Static Routes Label Binding


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2 Responses to “What is LDP extended discovery?”

  1. Hi,

    ‘In the AToM and TE cases you don’t need to use the previous command because the session will be established automatically after adding the service required configuration’

    When is the targetted LDP initated in the above case?

    Can you give some examples of such commands? xconnect?

  2. Hi Imran,

    Yes, with AToM just configuring the xconnect command initiates the targeted LDP session, but with TE it is a little different (remember that the most common scenario that you require LDP with TE is when the tunnel is terminated on a P router, we can have a latter post discussing this in details), with TE it depends on the scenario, if you have just one tunnel from the head-end to the tail-end thus you’ll need to instruct the tail-end router to accept the LDP targeted session using the “mpls ldp discovery targeted-hello accept” command, while if you had bidirectional TE tunnels setup, in this case having “mpls ip” under both tunnel interfaces initiates the session for you.

    I hope that I’ve been informative.

    BR,
    Mohammed Mahmoud.

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