Tunneling techniques for end-to-end VPNs: generic deployment in an optical testbed environment

Service providers today are constantly seeking to offer multiple services on a single common infrastructure. For instance, it is desirable sometimes to provide transport services transparently to data traffic encapsulated over different network layers. Tunneling is a technique for encapsulating a packet or frame within another packet of the same or a different network layer. One of the motivations for tunneling is bridging various heterogeneous networks that use different protocols for communication. Tunneling is also used for providing private and secure communications over a publicly shared network. This article investigates the interactions between different tunneling technologies in order to provide end-to-end virtual connectivity to end clients. Particularly, the article describes the technical details of the implementation of various layer 2 tunneling techniques - such as L2TP, GRE, and MPLS-based tunnels - in order to establish an end-to-end virtual connection service as a concatenation of services offered by the different network domains along the path between end users