How This Book Is Organized

You could read this book cover to cover, but the chapters are also designed to let you pick and choose just the material that interests you. The book does have a one-stop shop philosophy and so prepares the way for discussion of architectures by covering the protocols and technologies that networks actually use.

The book is intended to be reasonably self-sufficient, so it introduces the basics of both broadband access and label switching before tackling the union of the two. That said, a lot of background detail isn't included, so if your work, network, or interest pushes you to know more about traffic engineering, for example, you should certainly look for a specialized title. The appendix gives the full bibliography used to prepare this book, and you may find some of those references useful, too. Readers who are familiar with the introductory material should skip ahead to the parts that interest them more directly.

The book is organized into these sections:

Chapters 2 through 4 introduce access protocols, VPNs, and MPLS.
Chapters 5 through 8 are the core of the book and cover the architecture, configuration, and examples of use of MPLS in broadband access VPNs.
Chapter 9 looks forward at other technologies coming soon to the access VPN near you, such as IPv6.

The details of each chapter are as follows:

Chapter 1, Introduction: Broadband Access and Virtual Private Networks This chapter introduces the players of the broadband world: PTTs, retail ISPs, and others. It also discusses different service models, which is how anyone makes money from all this technology. Finally, the chapter defines a framework that will be used to compare different VPN solutions.
Chapter 2: Delivering Broadband Access Today: An Access Technologies Primer This chapter covers the fundamentals of broadband access service architectures, highlighting the three most common protocols: PPP, bridging, and the more recent 802.1q, and looks at where the protocols are most commonly used, namely DSL, cable, and ETTx.
Chapter 3: VPNs in Broadband Networks This chapter covers the use of tunnels over IP. L2TP, IPSec, and GRE are probably the most prevalent form of VPN today. The chapter goes through each in turn, first at the protocol level and then at the configuration level, before finally comparing their suitability for broadband access using the VPN framework, which includes security capability, QoS support, and so forth.
Chapter 4: Introduction to MPLS Before getting into road-hardened discussions of large-scale broadband, this chapter reviews fundamental label-switching concepts. This is not an exhaustive explanation because this topic is addressed in other books, but it provides necessary technical grounding for readers who are unfamiliar with MPLS, focusing on the topics that become important in subsequent sections.
Chapter 5: Introduction to MPLS-Based Access VPN Architectures Tunnel-based VPNs work well between a small number of peers, but MPLS VPN becomes much more practical as the number of peers increases. Some of the main requirements of broadband access VPN are the ability to deal with complex network topologies with the least amount of provisioning, and to provide support for advanced QoS. MPLS VPN does this admirably. This chapter describes the architectures of an MPLS-based solution, explains how subscribers are mapped to VRFs, and introduces the concept of a Virtual Home Gateway.
Chapter 6: Wholesale MPLS-VPN Related Service Features In good design, detail counts, and this chapter goes into a lot of detail. For example, subscriber features and services must be VRF aware, all the way down to the av-pairs used in RADIUS profiles. Here, you get close to the implementation and go through some of the changes and permutations that can make configuring a complete VRF-aware solution a challenge.
Chapter 7: Implementing Network-Based Access VPNs Without MPLS Again, recognizing that MPLS is not mandatory and that some network designs will not or cannot use it, this chapter looks at how to use the IP tunnels covered in Chapter 2 in a network-based solution. Because the implementation reuses many of the features developed for MPLS, this is somewhat of an extended case study of how to use VRFs. The chapter discusses virtual routersboth what they are and what they aren't.
Chapter 8: Case Studies for Using MPLS with Broadband VPNs This chapter goes over two case studies at a design level (no configuration details here) and looks at the different ways to deploy network services, both with and without the MPLS-based approach to help highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each solution.
Chapter 9: Future Developments in Broadband Access Finally, this chapter looks at technologies coming soon to the broadband network near you. IPv6 is an obvious candidate and will be a motor for some big changes in broadband, just as it is in other areas of networking. In anticipation of the convergence of commercial metro and residential broadband access networks, this chapter also looks at L2VPN technologies.
Appendix A: References and Bibliography This appendix contains a list of references to help you find more information about topics that are of particular interest to you.