By Jason Cole, Cox Communications
This document details the deployment of Segment Routing in the residential domains. It lays the foundation for the sustaining engineering team to begin low-level planning and testing. The earliest sections of the document explain the value of Segment Routing; primarily in the residential domain. This is done by comparing SR’s technical features against LDP and RSVP-TE. Most of this document describes the operational challenges of implementation. The challenges are arranged into three categories:
- Hardware and Software
- Global Block (SRGB) Standardization
- Interworking
Matrices describe vendor software support, as well as hardware and software readiness of each market. The same section details why Segment Routing will not be deployed on all hardware, even though supported in code. Recommendations for code versions are provided for initial lab testing. The document also describes each platform’s label depth, factors impacting label depth and why, for the foreseeable future, label depth will not be a concern in the residential network. Index assignments, which are derived from Segment Routing Global Blocks (SRGB), require planning. This document describes factors impacting planning and will recommend the assignment method. Last of the challenges is interworking. This will be illustrated in various drawings and described using CLI configurations. The concluding section will describe the implementation process and a FOA recommendation. It will detail the steps required to get to a “SR Core” in a residential market, using illustrations and configurations.