Vpls Best-site id

With network-based applications becoming prevalent, solutions that provide connectivity over wide area become more attractive for customers. In small-to-medium enterprise sector, Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), is a very useful service provider offering. It creates an emulated LAN segments fully capable of learning and forwarding Ethernet MAC addresses. Today, in VPLS implementations, within the context of a VPLS PE (VE), a single-site is selected from which all PWs are rooted. The site- election mechanism is usually hard-coded by different vendors (e.g. minimum or maximum site-id), and as such, is outside end-users control. This offers no flexibility to end-users as it forces them to define the site-id allocation scheme well in advance, or deal with the consequences of a suboptimal site-id election. Moreover, whenever the elected site-id is declared down, the traffic to and from all other sites hosted within the same VE is impacted as well. This draft defines protocol extensions to keep core- facing pseudowires (PWs) established at all times, regardless of the events taking place on the attachment-circuit (AC) segment when using the BGP-based signaling procedures.