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22-16
Cisco 10000 Series Router Software Configuration Guide
OL-2226-23
Chapter 22 Configuring Multilink Point-to-Point Protocol Connections
Multi-VC MLP over ATM Virtual Circuits
• Each member link can have a bandwidth rate up to 2048 kbps.
• The router only supports member links with the same encapsulation type.
• MLP PVCs cannot be on-demand VCs that are automatically provisioned.
• Associating MLP over ATM PVCs with ATM virtual paths (VPs) is discouraged, though not
prevented.
• The valid multilink interface values are 10000 to 65534. For example:
Router(config)# interface multilink 10004
The values higher than 65534 are used for multi-member bundles
• Cisco IOS software supports a maximum of 4096 total virtual template interfaces.
• You cannot manually configure the bandwidth on a bundle interface using the bandwidth command.
• If a virtual template attached to a member link specifies a bandwidth, the router does not clone the
specified bandwidth to the MLP bundle and the member links.
• You cannot apply a virtual template with MLP configured to an MLP bundle.
• If link fragmentation and interleaving (LFI) is enabled, only one link is used for interleaving. For
more information, see the “Fragmenting and Interleaving Real-Time and Nonreal-Time Packets”
chapter in the
Cisco 10000 Series Router Quality of Service Configuration Guide.
• We strongly recommend that you use only strict priority queues when configuring MLP over
ATM-based LFI. For more information, see the “Prioritizing Services” chapter in the
Cisco 10000
Series Router Quality of Service Configuration Guide.
Multi-VC MLP over ATM Virtual Circuits
The Multi-VC MLP over ATM virtual circuits (VCs) feature enhances the MLP over Serial interfaces
feature by enabling you to configure multilink Point-to-Point Protocol (MLP) on multiple ATM VCs. By
doing so, you can aggregate multiple data paths (for example, PPP over ATM encapsulated ATM VCs)
into a single logical connection called an MLP bundle (see the
“MLP Bundles” section on page 22-3).
An MLP bundle can have up to 10 member links.
Multi-VC MLP over ATM provides the following functions:
• Load balancing—MLP provides bandwidth on demand and uses load balancing across all member
links (up to 10) to transmit packets and packet fragments. The multiple links come up in response
to a defined load threshold. MLP mechanisms calculate load on both inbound and outbound traffic,
or on either direction as needed for traffic between specific sites. Because MLP uses all member
links to transmit packets and fragments, MLP reduces transmission latency across WAN links.
• Increased redundancy—MLP allows traffic to flow over the remaining member links when a port
fails. You can configure the member links on separate physical ports on the same line card or on
different line cards. If a port becomes unavailable, MLP directs traffic over the remaining member
links with minimal disruption to the traffic flow. MLP mechanisms preserve packet ordering over an
entire bundle.
• Link fragmentation and interleaving—The MLP fragmentation mechanism fragments packets and
sends the fragments at the same time over multiple point-to-point links to the same remote address.
MLP multilink encapsulates large nonreal-time packets and fragments them into a small enough size
to satisfy the delay requirements of real-time traffic. The smaller real-time packets remain intact and
MLP sends the packets to a special transmit queue, allowing the packets to be sent earlier than other
packet flows. The MLP interleaving mechanism sends the real-time packets between the fragments
of the nonreal-time packets.