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This document introduces new IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) code points to identify which traffic is being forwarded based on which MPLS control plane protocol within a Segment Routing domain. In particular, this document defines four code points for the IPFIX mplsTopLabelType Information Element for IS-IS, OSPFv2, OSPFv3, and BGP MPLS Segment Routing extensions.

Four new routing protocol extensions, OSPFv2 Extensions, OSPFv3 Extensions, IS-IS Extensions and BGP Prefix Segment Identifiers (Prefix-SIDs) have been defined as routing protocols that are able to propagate Segment Routing (SR) labels for the MPLS data plane . Also describes how IP Flow Information Export can be leveraged to account traffic to MPLS SR label dimensions within a Segment Routing domain. In , the Information Element (IE) mplsTopLabelType(46) identifies which MPLS control plane protocol allocated the top-of-stack label in the MPLS label stack. Section 7.2 of creates the "IPFIX MPLS label type (Value 46)" subregistry where MPLS label type should be added. This document defines new code points to address typical use cases that are discussed in Section 2.

By introducing four new code points to the IPFIX IE mplsTopLabelType(46) for IS-IS, OSPFv2, OSPFv3 and BGP Prefix-SID, it is possible to identify which traffic is being forwarded based upon which MPLS SR control plane protocol is in use. A typical use case is to monitor MPLS control plane migrations from LDP to IS-IS or OSPF Segment Routing. Such a migration can be done node by node as described in Appendix A of . Another use case is to monitor MPLS control plane migrations from dynamic BGP labels to BGP Prefix-SIDs in the context of Seamless MPLS SR described in Section 4.6 of . Both use cases can be verified by using mplsTopLabelType(46), mplsTopLabelIPv4Address(47), mplsTopLabelIPv6Address(140), mplsTopLabelStackSection(70) and forwardingStatus(89) IEs to infer how many packets are forwarded or dropped to which MPLS provider edge loopback address and label protocol, and if dropped for which reasons. By looking at the MPLS label value itself, it is not always clear as to which label protocol it belongs. This because they may share the same label allocation range. This is, for example, the case for IGP-Adjacency SIDs, LDP and dynamic BGP labels.

This document requests IANA to allocate the following code points in the existing subregistry "IPFIX MPLS label type (Value 46)" under the "IPFIX Information Elements" registry available at .

Note to the RFC-Editor: Please replace TBD1 - TBD4 with the values allocated by IANA Please replace the [RFC-to-be] with the RFC number assigned to this document

In the IE mplsTopLabelType(46), the BGP code point 4 refers to the label value in MP_REACH_NLRI path attribute described in Section 2 of , while the BGP Segment Routing Prefix-SID code point TBD4 corresponds to the label index value in the Label-Index TLV described in Section 3.1 of . These values are thus used for those distinct purposes

There exists no extra security considerations regarding the allocation of these new IPFIX IEs compared to .

I would like to thank to the IE doctors, Paul Aitken and Andrew Feren, as well Benoit Claise, Loa Andersson, Tianran Zhou, Pierre Francois, Bruno Decreane, Paolo Lucente, Hannes Gredler, Ketan Talaulikar, Sabrina Tanamal, Erik Auerswald, Sergey Fomin, Mohamed Boucadair, Tom Petch and Qin Wu for their review and valuable comments.