Musings on IP/MPLS Network Architecture for IR

Rakesh Ranjan, CSE, ECR

Abstract gration of various network services to Ethernet can

avoid the same including the future-E1 support.
Indian Railways decided to upgrade its backbone net-
work from SDH to IP/MPLS in 2020. Since then, var-
ious railways have planned and proposed works and 2 General Network Architecture
now there are a few installations in field. As of March
Because of its criticality, it is very important that the
2023, 143 stations were provided with IP/MPLS router.
backbone network is architected to achieve high up-
The IP/MPLS network is critical as it will be the back-
time with adequate redundancy. The maintenance strat-
bone for the Captive LTE network of Railways that will
egy for this network should also match with the ad-
power the National Automatic Train Protection (NATP)
ministrative structure of Indian Railways. As divisions
System – Kavach. This paper collects my musings
are the entity that are responsible for the train opera-
on the issues of general network architecture for the
tion and maintenance, it is essential that the division
IP/MPLS network of Indian Railways.
be responsible for the proper upkeep of both the LTE
as well as the backbone network. For long, the divi-
1 Introduction sions have evolved mechanisms to coordinate with each
other to run the trains. Similar arrangements may have
Indian Railways is imbibing Kavach in its network. to be evolved for maintaining these all-India networks.
Kavach currently uses mComm, the radio communi- These goals will have to reflect in the chosen architec-
cation protocol developed by Railways in 400MHz ture.
band. It has, however, been decided to use LTE for
Kavach in future. The LTE network will cover all the 2.1 MPLS Domain
tracks and stations of Indian Railways. It will use the
IP/MPLS backbone network that Railways is setting The complete network of a division should be one
up. The IP/MPLS backbone network thus becomes MPLS domain. This means that the MPLS network of
very critical in terms of rail operation as it will power a division is complete and independent in itself. It shall
the LTE network that in turn will be used by Kavach. provide complete redundancy for protection of band-
width at each of its station without interfering with the
RDSO has issued a technical Advisory Note (TAN) network of any other division for its optimized work-
incorporating the specifications of IP/MPLS router, ing.
proof of concept (PoC) methodology and interoperabil-
ity scheme. The latest version of the TAN is version 2.1. 2.2 Fiber Utilization
This version specifies the following salient:
Railways is laying OFC along its route on both sides of
a. The control plane redundancy has been mandated the track. It has been planned that these fibres will be
in the Label edge routers to be provided at all sta- terminated on the MPLS router. The general diagram
tions.as well. This means that the routers at every for the same is as shown below.
station will have control plane redundancy. This is
to enhance reliability looking into Kavach’s require-
ment.

b. The important interface ports have been distributed

on minimum two cards for achieving interface level
redundancy in all the routers. Figure 1: IP/MPLS Network - Fiber Utilization

c. No. of 10G ports have been enhanced to connect

OFC on both sides of the track with the router. 2.3 Long/Short Haul Communication
d. The E1 interfaces have been made optional so that In the IP/MPLS network, all the junction stations will
those Railways that have moved ahead in the mi- be provided with a Label Switch Router (LSR). The La-
bel Edge Router (LER) will be provided at all station. there are no divisions that can provide the protection
The traffic in an MPLS network is switched through link (P3).
LSPs (Label Switched Path). The LSR-LSR connectiv-
ity should be done at the LSP level for efficient routing
through the LERs.

Figure 2: Short/Long Haul LSP

Figure 4: Protection scheme for IP-MPS network at di-
visional boundaries
2.4 Linear Network/Boundary Protection
The protection of linear network is very important to 2.5 Interconnecting MPLS Domains
be done in the MPLS network. Similarly, the MPLS
When all the divisions setup their independent MPLS
domains has to be bifurcated at the boundary stations.
domains, these MPLS domains will have to be con-
Let us take two hypothetical divisions D1 and D2
nected to a Core carrier network so that these can be
to appreciate and see how the linear network and
interconnected. A Core carrier network will therefore
the boundary stations can be protected as the MPLS
have to be hired from a service providerfor this con-
domains of D1 and D2 are different.
nectivity. In case of higher uptime requirement, we
may hire the core carrier network from two service
Figure 3 shows two divisions – D1 and D2. These are
providers. It is recommended that we hire the services
connected at stations C and J. The MPLS boundaries
of two service providers looking into the criticality of
of the divisions shall get terminated at these stations.
the backbone network and the fact that it will be carry-
ing LTE as well as Kavach traffic. It is suggested that
the division’s network is connected at least at two lo-
cations on the core carrier network of both the service
providers. As per the current government regulations,
we can hire services only from Government Telecom
companies like RailTel, BSNL etc. for this purpose.
Figure 5 shows this scheme and connectivity.

2.6 Core Connectivity

Division’s MPLS network shall connect with the
Figure 3: Inter-division Map core network according to the scheme called Carrier-
Supporting-Carriers (CSC). It is also called Carriers-
Figure 4 shows the boundaries of the MPLS network. of-Carriers connectivity scheme. Carrier Supporting
It can be seen that the link from station E to C becomes Carrier solution enables divisions to use the network
linear for Div 1. Similarly, the link from I to J for of another large service provider in order to connect
Div2 remains linear from MPLS perspective. These parts of their own networks. Using the transport
linear sections will have to be protected. Figure 4 also services provided by another service provider in
depicts the proposed protection methodology for these this manner eliminates the need for the divisions to
linear sections. build and maintain their own MPLS backbone. As
the geographical extent of a division is limited but
For this protection, Division 1 shall take a 1G Layer-2 the MPLS network of Indian Railways spans the
MPLS link (P2) from Div 2 from station C to J and use whole country, this scheme is expected to provide the
this link in its network for closing the ring for protec- required redundancy, uptime and scalability without
tion. Similarly, Div 2 shall take a layer-2 MPLS link any changes in the responsibility area of the divisions.
(P1) from station C to J from Div 1 to protect its net-
work. Other linear network portions can be protected The service provider that provides connectivity over
by hiring links from other telecom service providers if its cloud to the other providers is called the Backbone
Figure 5: Core Connectivity & Interoperability

carrier. The CSC architecture is designed so that infrastructure. These services have different require-
the CSC backbone carrier only needs to know about ment in terms of quality of services (QoS) and delay
internal routes available within the divisions backbone performances. The IP/MPLS network is expected to
network in order to provide connectivity between all carry these traffics from one point to another with the
the customer carrier routers. The division’s network specified performance criterion. The IP/MPLS point
doesn’t need to know about any backbone carrier inter- of presence will be at every station where the different
nal routes since no communication is required between VPNs should be terminated.
the divisions routers and the backbone carrier routers.
The customer traffic of the division’s network will be
2.8 Quality of Service
label switched within the backbone carrier network (as
if VPN traffic within its own VRF), meaning that the The quality of service that is required for various ser-
backbone carrier routers do not need to know about vices to work on the IP/MPLS backbone of Indian Rail-
routes that belong to end customers connected to the ways will have to de carefully defined. Various traffic
division’s network - as if the backbone carrier routers will have to be carefully classified into various traffic
are Label Switched Routers (LSRs) for the customer classes and associated with a delay performance profile
carrier network. This makes CSC architecture highly so that the network will function as expected. One of
scalable and secure. the most challenging aspects is to ensure that the QoS
is respected across MPLS domains (i.e. MPLS network
Another advantage of CSC lies in the fact that the of each division). For this purpose, QoS will have to be
divisions operation does not depends on the service standardized and implemented across the divisions in
provider of the backbone carrier. Hence, divisions a uniform manner so that the same works seamlessly.
need not coordinate with the service providers when- This will also have to gel with the QoS requirement of
ever they have to do any service provisioning in their Kavach and LTE networks.
network. This brings in independence as well as self-
sufficiency.
3 Railway’s Network Interoperability
2.7 Multiple Networks – VPNs
Such a large network as Railways will obviously have
The IP/MPLS backbone network will be carrying all the routers of different make. Thus, the challenge of in-
network services of Indian Railways like ticketing net- teroperability of the different makes of routers provid-
work, LTE traffic, Kavach traffic, FOIS traffic, Passen- ing proper QoS and delay performance for the different
ger Information, Railnet, Voice traffic (Railway phone), VPNs it is required to support always remain. For the
Video traffic etc. Mostly L2 VPN and L3 VPN will be purpose of interoperability, it is therefore preferrable
used for carrying these traffics over Railway’s MPLS that in one MPLS domain, routers of only one OEM
be used to avoid the interoperability challenge. How-
ever, the interoperability between different domains has
been defined in the RDSO’s TAN version 2.0 and it also
specifies that the interoperability testing must be en- Shri Rakesh Ranjan, with an
sured by Railways while procuring these routers. Fig- experience of 26 years in Rail-
ure 5 shows the interoperability architecture as defined ways Signaling and Telecom-
the TAN v2.0. munication in Indian Rail-
ways is currently working as
Chief Signal Engineer – I in
4 Conclusion ECR, Hajipur. He has var-
ied experience majorly cover-
The IP/MPLS network of Railways will be complex
ing project execution, policy
and critical network. It is the future communica-
formulation, training, network
tion network of Railways for providing integrated
design, research and develop-
high-bandwidth, high-speed connectivity. With the
ment, operation and mainte-
Railways adopting Auto-Signalling, IoT based main-
nance of signalling and tele-
tenance and Kavach, the reach of this network will
com gears. He is a strong advocate of open-source
have to be extended in the block sections as well in the
movement – both hardware and software. His current
future. The networks are being commissioned now but
interest includes work on open hardware and software
the challenge of migrating the services and managing
for programmable logic controller to be used in In-
the same from multiple network operation centres
dian railways for alert-based maintenance of signalling
remains. The migration can be done in many different
gears.
ways. Should we continue to use L2 circuits or migrate
the services to L3-VPN? Pros and cons for these
approaches will have to be carefully evaluated and a
scheme for the same will have to be finalised. Those
Railways that have installed their MPLS networks
like SWR and NFR can relate their experiences and
suggest methodologies. IRISET will have to play a
vital role in training the telecom manpower make them
comfortable in the new technology and upgrade their
skill to be able to manage and maintain this network.