Overview of IP Hard Pipe

Definition

IP hard pipe is an IP-network-based access technology that strictly isolates soft and hard pipes by reserving hardware on routers. The hard pipe can preempt the bandwidth resources of the soft pipe while not being affected by soft pipe congestion. The hard pipe can provide guaranteed bandwidth and low delay for the leased line services of high-value customers.

In the IP hard pipe solution, NCE is used to manage bandwidth resources network-wide. The physical interface bandwidth on the public network is divided and allocated to hard and soft pipes. For example, on a 10G Ethernet interface, 2 Gbit/s bandwidth is allocated to the hard pipe, and the remaining 8 Gbit/s is allocated to the soft pipe. The hard and soft pipes are isolated. The hard pipe can preempt the bandwidth resources of the soft pipe, but the soft pipe cannot preempt the bandwidth of the hard pipe.

Figure 1 IP hard pipe networking

Purpose

Customers that have high requirements on bandwidth, low delay, and high security prefer synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) networks. To retain these customers, carriers must keep both IP and SDH networks, which costs a lot in maintenance. Therefore, carriers expect to migrate the customer network to the IP network to reduce maintenance costs and facilitate user management.

IP hard pipe has been developed to meet up with this expectation. It provides bandwidth guarantee and low delay on IP networks, allowing the IP networks to provide access services with SDH service quality. It also provides service-specific granular OAM and SLA monitoring, which will accelerate the migration of SDH networks to IP leased line networks.

Benefits