SRv6 News

Rakuten Mobile and Cisco have collaborated to successfully complete one of the world's largest SRv6 uSID IP transport network migrations, unlocking a new era of unprecedented speed, agility and on-demand services for Japanese businesses nationwide.

Akash Agrawal (Technical Director – IP Engineering at Rakuten Mobile, Inc.) has presented Rakuten SRv6 Journey and Experience during the SRv6OPS WG meeting at IETF 120.

The PhoenixWing Initiative, launched in Beijing, on May 25th 2024, aims to integrate SRv6 into SONiC platforms, reducing costs and enhancing features. Backed by major tech firms like Alibaba and Cisco, it promises to expand SONiC's network applications and marks a collaborative milestone for the community. Visit this news item to view the endorsement videos.

This case study highlights Alibaba Cloud’s transformation of its data center infrastructure using SONiC, an open and mature network operating system. Alibaba has reached the 100.000 whiteboxes milestone. Explore how Alibaba achieved substantial cost savings, enhanced network quality, and accelerated innovation across both AI and standard cloud compute/storage architectures, with a commitment to ongoing collaboration within the SONiC community for continuous advancements in network technologies.

Technological evolution does not stop, and telecommunications networks are at the forefront of this transformation. VIVO, one of the giants in the industry, is adopting innovative strategies to optimize its operations and improve the user experience. In this blog, we will explore the implementation of SRv6 uSID, a revolutionary approach, in Telefonica VIVO’s infrastructure. This relentless evolution drives the transformation of telecommunications networks, adopting innovative strategies to enhance services and operations with a focus on user experience.

In the world of networking, collaboration between industry leaders is crucial to drive innovation and develop cutting-edge solutions to resolve critical biz problems. This blog post highlights the industry collaboration between Alibaba Cloud and Cisco in developing and deploying an SRv6 SONiC whitebox router to support Alibaba Cloud’s ‘Predictable Network’ vision, which supports all Alibaba Cloud services. We explore the value proposition of SRv6 as a unified protocol across different domains, the full-stack solution developed by the joint-forces of the community, and the results in deploying the solution in the production network of Alibaba.

IPv6, as stated in Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandate, is the new IP standard for the US Federal Government. IPv6 provides the additional addressing and foundation towards a Zero Trust enabled infrastructure.
Combining Segment Routing with IPv6, known as SRv6, lays the foundation for end-to-end services and zero trust security across an entire organization/enterprise.
Learn more about the benefits of SRv6 and how it aligns with your IPv6 strategy in this blog.

TPG Telecom has collaborated with Cisco to deploy a new networking technology known as segment routing over IPv6 (SRv6) to help it more efficiently manage and direct traffic over its 5G and fixed-line networks.

SRv6 simplifies network management by giving traffic instructions in advance, reducing the need to send data through multiple routers. According to the telco, this is an Australian first.

It’s an exciting milestone for Cisco and our customer Czech Education and Scientific NETwork (CESNET) who is the first national research and education network (NREN) to deploy Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) micro-segment (uSID) to simplify its network architecture. Being the first NREN to deploy SRv6 uSID demonstrates CESNET’s leadership as an innovative NREN operator in the Czech Republic.

CESNET is a developer and operator of national e-infrastructure for science, research, development, and education in Czech Republic. CESNET is an early adopter of SRv6 technology and simplifies its network with SRv6 uSID for improved SLA services to CESNET members and customers

We are excited that CESNET selected Cisco to be the first NREN deployed using SRv6 uSID based on our industry leadership with SRv6 and applaud the customer on its tremendous industry-first milestone!

The support for SRv6 uSID has been merged in FRR.  FRR has now full support of SRv6 uSID based L3VPN BGP services. It supports both IPv4 and IPv6 address families either using a separate SRv6 Service SID for each address family (End.DT4 and End.DT6) or using a single SRv6 Service SID (End.DT46) for both.

The SRv6 uSID implementation in FRR has been developed by Carmine Scarpitta from the university of Rome tor Vergata.

iBASIS Customers experience the benefits of Segment routing across the iBASIS next generation IPX core network with the realization of accelerated increases in data capacity as their business demands, combined with routing redundancy that secures successful delivery of their traffic during peak periods. As the market evolves, this advanced technology with centralized path determination that enables a simplified iBASIS network architecture with redundant and scalable routing capabilities positions iBASIS to successfully deliver new 5G and IoT services for our customers.

Segment routing traffic engineering powered by Cisco provides the scale, agility, and cost effectiveness that iBASIS requires to exceed customer expectations and remain a leader in our industry.

Intel, Lanner and NoviFlow presented as part of Intel’s Network Builder series a webinar introducing the SRv6 Service Engine.

SRv6 Service Engine simplifies the deployment of 5G network infrastructure and makes it easier to scale and move services to the network edge by delivering Segment Routing over IPv6. The solution reduces carrier network services cost by up to 90%, hardware footprint by 75%, and power consumption by as much as 66%, using an open, programmable architecture built on Intel technology including the P4-based Intel® Tofino™.

Presenters:
- John Demay, Business Development Manager, Intel
- Sven Freudenfeld, CTO Lanner Electronics
- Jesper Ericsson, VP Product Management, NoviFlow

Cisco and Rakuten Mobile, Inc. announced a major milestone for Rakuten Mobile’s network infrastructure in support of efforts to build a better, more inclusive internet for the future.
- Rakuten Mobile using Segment Routing over IPv6 and Cisco Routed Optical Networking to simplify its network architecture and lower costs.
- The synergy of SRv6 and Cisco Routed Optical Networking will provide Rakuten Mobile with unmatched operational flexibility, network simplicity, speed-to-market and a path to profitability.
- Cisco Customer Experience (CX) will manage the architecture design for the network enhancements to help Rakuten Mobile speed time to market with new services and applications.

Indosat Ooredoo is proud to announce that they are now ready to build a 5G-ready transport network based on new converged Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Segment Routing IPv6 (SRv6) architecture, powered by Cisco.

In this webinar, representatives from LightReading, Cisco and Bell Canada explore the state of SRv6 (SR with IPv6 data plane) and explain how it enhances all SR MPLS capabilities – simplification, resiliency, traffic engineering.

In this podcast, Dennis Cai, Chief Architect of Network Infrastructure at Alibaba talks about Segment Routing SRv6.
Topics:
- Alibaba's key factors driving SRv6 adoption.
- The use-cases Alibaba plans to address with SRv6.
- SRv6 micro-instructions.
- Alibaba recommends particulars to ensure successful SRv6 implementation.

Segment Routing is the term widely used in the industry to refer to Source Packet Routing In Networking (SPRING), as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Cisco has pioneered Segment Routing since 2012 and has led the standardization efforts with the support of a group of lead operators, resulting in few RFCs and over 50 active internet-drafts.
In this podcast today, we’re going to deep dive into some technical aspects with Bertrand Duvivier, Principal Engineer from Cisco.

On 2 March 2020, the United States Federal Government released a statement about their plan to transition the majority of U.S. Government networks and services to IPv6-only networks inside the next five years. The new draft requires that "at least 80% of IP-enabled assets on federal networks are IPv6-only by the end of fiscal 2025".
In this blog, John Curran, President and CEO at ARIN, indicates that "Now is the time to begin your IPv6 planning and deployment, if you haven’t already."

With close to three quarters of a billion Internet users and billions of Internet of Things devices expected to connect to the Internet in the next five years, it’s little wonder why China is accelerating IPv6 deployment.
The Chinese government issued an ‘Action Plan for the Large-scale Deployment of IPv6’ in November 2017, which seeks to build the world’s largest IPv6 business network in the coming eight years. By the end of 2025, all networks and websites in China, with more than a billion users, will be running IPv6.
In this blog, Yuedong Zhang, Assistant Director of the System Operations, IP Business, Technical Administration at CNNIC, discusses the current state of the IPv6 deployment and gives some insight in what they expect to see in the next years.

The ROSE project tackles multiple aspects of the SRv6 technology: Data Plane, Control Plane, SRv6 host networking stack, integration with applications, integration with Cloud/Data Center Infrastructures. ROSE builds up and maintain a Linux based Open Ecosystem for SRv6, composed of several sub-projects, like SRPerf (performance evaluation of SRv6 implementations), SRv6 SDN (gRPC based API for controlling SRv6 Linux routers), SRv6 uSID implementation in Linux and P4 and several others. The ROSE project home page provides a full list of projects, code repositories and scientific papers that have been published.

5G brings in significant changes to the mobile architecture. It relies heavily on virtualization and containerization, splits the mobile control and user plane and introduces network slicing. In the radio space new spectrum is available and the Radio Access Network infrastructure has been de-aggregated into three discrete components that can be integrated into a single unit or split across different locations.
This podcast is going to concentrate on the transport network and how segment routing can address the new requirements and changes brought in by the 5G mobile architecture.
Ray interviews Distinguished Consulting Engineer at Cisco Simon Spraggs

Network programming is seminal to the Segment Routing over IPv6 data plane (SRv6) solution. It allows for expressing any end-to-end service in a stateless manner as a set of 16-byte instructions (Segment ID, or SID) encoded in the packet header. These instructions may express TE, FRR, VPN behaviours, as well as application behaviours.
In this post, we introduce a straightforward extension to the SRv6 network program: each 16-byte instruction may contain up to six micro-instructions. The SRv6 Segment Routing Extension Header (SRH) data plane (RFC 8754) and the SRv6 control plane are leveraged without any change.

As of 2019, Segment Routing over IPv6 data plane (SRv6) has been deployed in eight large-scale networks; supported by more than 25 hardware implementations at line rate; implemented in 11 open-source platforms/applications; and, importantly, is undergoing IETF standardization (RFC 8402, RFC 8754).
In this post, we will go through the numerous use cases that have been deployed as of February 2019.

Since the start of the Segment Routing over IPv6 dataplane (SRv6) project in 2017, the ecosystem has grown unabated.
SRv6 has been deployed in eight public, large-scale commercial networks, including Softbank, Iliad, China Telecom, LINE Corporation, China Unicom, CERNET2, China Bank and Uganda MTN.

NTT DOCOMO selected Cisco NCS routers and Segment Routing technology for network slicing to help optimize its 5G mobile backhaul in preparation for the commercial service.
Mobile backhaul is the transport network that connects the 5G radio (in the cell tower) to the core network that feeds into the data centers. DOCOMO needed a blueprint for more cost effective transport to meet its future 5G base station facility plan capable of achieving 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) speeds.

Segment Routing MPLS customer adoption is truly outstanding. As of today, we count more than 30 live deployments and about 80 deployments are planned. Kevin Wollenweber, Vice President Of Product Management at Cisco Systems, explains why the pace of adoption for SRv6 will be even faster.

The Intel FPGA Programmable Accelerator Card (PAC) N3000, an FPGA-based solution, can be programmed to handle almost any type of functionality – including networking functions – thus improving network and server performance. HCL Technologies and Intel have co-authored a White Paper titled “Segment Routing Over IPv6 Acceleration Using Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card N3000” that describes a solution to hardware-based SRv6 using FPGA technology to improve network performance.

Agencies that continue to operate legacy systems can achieve greater IT performance and versatility, lower their operating costs and enhance their security controls simply by taking advantage of newer networking capabilities.
This promise comes through the segment routing architecture, which is gaining rapid adoption among large-scale network operators and architects, according to a new report. This report highlights the key benefits of segment routing and explains that it is designed to work with legacy systems too.

Segment Routing is now a well-accepted evolution path for simplifying IP/MPLS networks and for providing a solution to address the emerging requirements of 5G/IoT and service virtualization. We believe SR-MPLS and SRv6 will be increasingly deployed in service provider, enterprise, and data center networks. However, it is still early days for SRv6, and there is still a lot of work ahead to develop the vendor ecosystem and get to standardized, interoperable implementations of key features and services.

In this blog Muhammad Durrani, leading Global Network Architecture and Engineering at Equinix, explains how SR builds value to their customers. As the world’s global data center interconnection leader, Equinix is constantly innovating on behalf of its customers to help them grow their businesses. At the core of the Equinix interconnection value proposition is a global network infrastructure that offers multiple network services to both Service Providers and Enterprises alike. To offer new and differentiated value-added services and to provide a second-to-none customer experience, Equinix is implementing Segment Routing in their next-generation network infrastructure.

Softbank Corporation announced that they introduced SRv6 and began full-scale operation on a commercial network from April 2019.
Softbank aims to further enhance the efficiency and functionality of the network by introducing the latest technologies such as SRv6, and aims to realize a highly reliable mobile network that can cope with the future traffic for the age of 5G and IoT.
Click here for an English translation.

SR-TE solves the 3-tiered slice service use-case for Vodafone

The 3-tiered slice service solution (minimum cost, minimum delay, minimum cost with delay bound) was announced at CiscoLive! 2019 in Barcelona and at MPLS WC 2019 in Paris.
This solution is a product of the co-development between Vodafone Germany and Cisco Systems.

At the MPLS+SDN+NFV World Congress in Paris, Cisco announced its involvement in helping Iliad deploy a state-of-the-art national IP Network, powered by Segment Routing IPv6 (SRv6), to provide a new mobile offering in Italy.
Iliad is the parent company of Free, the inventor of the Freebox, the first multiservice box on ADSL.

EANTC AG, the European Advanced Networking Test Center published the results of the latest massive multi-vendor interoperability test with 174 successful test combinations involving 68 device types from 19 vendors.
The multi-vendor event focuses on the interoperability of the full range of next-generation wide-area transport solutions, network management and clock synchronization. Segment Routing MPLs and SRv6, Flex-Algo, and SR-TE are among the tested solutions.
Click here to access the EANTC whitepaper PDF.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Cisco announced its collaboration with SoftBank on the world's first Segment Routing IPv6 (SRv6) deployment. With the anticipation of the coming 5G era, Cisco has been assisting SoftBank to deploy state-of-the-art Segment Routing IPv6 (SRv6) networks nationwide to build a future network architecture that is extremely scalable, with improved reliability, flexibility and agility, all while helping to reduce CapEx and OpEx.

The topic-du-jour was definitely Segment Routing, and Cisco delivered great presentations on both SR-TE (Segment Routing – Tunnel Engineering) with SR Flexible Algorithm, and SRv6 (Segment Routing for IPv6).

Segment routing is not a new concept in the networking industry and it has gained great popularity among service providers around the globe. While service providers are adopting it for the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) data plane that is deployed extensively in existing networks, there is an increased interest to use segment routing with the IPv6 data plane for network programming (SRv6 network programming). There are many use cases that can benefit from the SRv6 network programming concept. Today, 5G is the main driver for fast-paced development of SRv6 standards to simplify the user plane and network plane. With Ixia’s IxNetwork SRv6 solution, customers can simulate SRv6 networks with many nodes to validate device under test (DUT) functions in different roles (ingress node, intermediate node, and egress node) and assess the performance for both control- and data-plane...

Service providers and large enterprises face stiff challenges: the network infrastructure and their operations are growing at tremendous pace and becoming complex. IP/MPLS networks have become operation intensive because of their complex implementations. Service providers feel the added pressure of falling revenues and stiff competition by the over-the-top providers as well as the challenge to innovate. These drivers make the network owners think about a transport technology that can provide convergence across layers, domains and offload the complexities in the networks today. One of these technologies is Segment Routing (SR), which has caught the attention of the network planners because of its potential to ...

With the explosive growth of network traffic, there is more pressure than ever on the network to operate with simplicity, speed, scale and resiliency. Since the emergence of Segment Routing (SR) five years ago, more and more customers have turned to this technology to help address the challenges of digitization and to accelerate the network transformation necessary to meet those challenges.

Cisco and Colt Technology Services announced today that they have successfully achieved a key milestone in upgrading Colt's pan-European, U.S. and Asian packet network. This lays the foundation for the Colt IQ Network to deliver further differentiated, high-bandwidth connectivity solutions. Colt's next-generation packet network uses end-to-end segment routing technology to simplify and automate network operation and significantly reduce operating costs. With the quality, speed, capacity and flexibility to meet application-specific service quality requirements, Colt’s customers will benefit from an infrastructure designed for enabling digital businesses.

As more and more Service Providers and Enterprises operate a single network infrastructure to support an ever-increasing number of services, the ability to custom fit transport to application needs is critically important. In that respect, network operators have been exploring Traffic Engineering techniques for some years now but have obviously run into many scaling issues preventing them from having an end-to-end, fine-grained control over the myriad services they offer. We firmly believe Segment Routing Traffic Engineering (SR TE) has changed the game and has become the undisputed solution to deliver Traffic Engineering capabilities at scale. What makes SR Flexible Algorithm a noteworthy addition to SR TE solution?

Today on the Packet Pushers Weekly Show we talk about control. Imagine being able to control every flow in your data center in a granular way, and not just based on the best path your routing protocol decides or the random hashing your ECMP comes up with. How do you get beyond the forwarding we’re used to? By manipulating flows with modern tools. One such tool is IPv6 segment routing (SRv6). Cisco, along with network architects from Bell Canada and LinkedIn, discuss just how IPv6 Segment Routing makes the network programmable in this sponsored episode.

Over the past few weeks, Bell Canada has successfully rolled out Segment Routing in its next-generation core network, marking a milestone as the first Canadian carrier to actively use this innovative technology for network automation and software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities.

The networking industry is going through an incredibly dynamic time of change and opportunity. Global IP traffic will increase nearly threefold over the next five years and 127-fold from 2005 to 2021. The number of devices connected to IP networks by 2021 will be three times higher than the global population. On top of that, the diversity of applications has never been greater, with each having its own set of requirements and hurdles. This unprecedented growth requires Service Providers to transform their networks, and Segment Routing is becoming one of the keys to successfully paving the way to that transformation.

Who would have bet on a SRv6 interoperability demonstration at SIGCOMM 2017 conference this summer? Very few of us actually… For those who are not familiar with the SIGCOMM 2017 conference, this is a highly respected conference where key networking innovations and orientations are being discussed every year by leading vendors, major web and service providers, and academic researchers.

At SIGCOMM 2017, Cisco Systems and Barefoot Networks showcased SRv6 interoperability of SRv6 VPN with traffic engineering and service chaining. The demonstration included three Cisco hardware implementations (Fretta, ASR9k and ASR1k); open source implementations in the Linux Kernel and FD.io VPP; and Barefoot's Tofino switch.

Cisco Systems G.K. today announced that SoftBank Corp. has adopted the Cisco Network Convergence System 5500 Series, providing high-density 100GE routing and Segment Routing technology for optimizing network operations for its next-generation mobile IP core network.

Segment Routing has crossed the chasm — "Early Adopters" have already embraced it, and now the "Early Majority" is adopting it. Interestingly, at the very same time the industry is surfing the Segment Routing MPLS wave, the next wave is already coming in and will even be more disruptive to the way you design and engineer your network infrastructure – this is the Segment Routing IPv6 (SRv6) wave.

Providing disjoint paths in an IP/MPLS network has always been a pain, especially when the disjointness must be achieved between pairs of routers. Cisco XR Traffic Controller is a PCE server allowing path disjointness computation.

Google XTC and you find out it was an English rock band formed in 1972 and active till 2006... It probably does not ring a bell to most of you — at least for me, I can’t recall any of their songs. XTC had another connotation in the 1980’s, but that’s not the point here either.

Check out the latest insight into the latest Segment Routing announcements at MPLS WC 2017.

A Heavy Reading white paper on making networks SDN-ready with Segment Routing.

As a WAN guy by chance and opportunity, and a service provider engineer and architect by choice (and also chance and opportunity), segment routing (SR) is one of those wonderful new technologies that keeps rearing its head over and over in recent days – and it’s already playing in the big leagues.

Do you remember source routing, used in token ring bridging networks? If you're relatively new to networking, you may not know about it. In source routing, the hosts determine the path to take through the network and build a frame header that specifies the forwarding nodes that the frame should pass through as it goes from source to destination.

You may be pretty familiar with Segment Routing and I bet you’re likely tying it to MPLS as the industry at large has been mainly focused on driving awareness and adoption of MPLS Segment Routing. But did you know Segment Routing could work in a native IPv6 environment? Sounds interesting to you?

Segment routing could prove to be a compelling alternative to OpenFlow, but more work needs to be done before it becomes a mainstream technology.

Segment routing is coming to a competitor near you and it will be a key element of the network infrastructure of the future. But what is it and how will it offer tangible benefits for you, the service provider?

My brain has now had a bit of time to recover from the information overload that was the Tech Field Day Segment Routing Round Table, so it is most definitely time to write a bit about what I learned.

Tech Field Day brought together experts from Walmart, Microsoft and Comcast to discuss and share their perspective on Segment Routing.

2016 is clearly an inflection point in Segment Routing adoption. Enterprise and Service Providers have tested and validated the technology and are ready to roll out the technology in live networks. Customers now fully understand the benefits of the technology - it's all about bringing simplicity and scalability to the network. No RSVP, no midpoint state, no tunnel to configure!