Demonstration of Segment Routing with SDN based label stack optimization

Segment Routing (SR) architecture is a promising technology. It is being standardized in collaboration between vendors and service providers. Through its simplistic control plane and the reuse of existing data planes namely MPLS and IPv6, SR helps operators to reduce the Operation Expense (OpEx) and the Capital Expense (CapEx). In the instantiation of SR over the MPLS data plane (SR-MPLS), a SR path gets encoded as a label stack that the ingress nodes push onto the client packet. However, the longer the path in term of traversed nodes the bigger the stack gets. In this demonstration, we couple the capabilities of an SDN controller and a path encoding engine to reduce that size of the label stack to express segment routing paths.