MPLS (by alaric)
One technology I'd really quite like to play with is Multiprotocol Label Switching.
It's a network protocol, but one that doesn't entirely fit right in with the standard ISO model stack; it's a low-level packet switching protocol like IP, but it doesn't have a transport layer (TCP, etc) on top of it. It's just used to tunnel other protocols like IP and Ethernet over.
The idea is that you set up a backbone of MPLS routers - connected by physical links (presumably either Ethernet loopback cables, or leased lines) or by tunnels over the IP Internet or ATM networks. Since MPLS is a simple protocol to route, these routers can be simpler (and faster, and able to handle more traffic per pound spend on hardware) than normal IP routers.
And then to this backbone you attach edge routers, which connect to external IP or Ethernet networks, and duly route or bridge said external networks over the MPLS tunnels.
The neat part is that it's just as easy to run IP as Ethernet over the MPLS backbone, giving you the flexibility to link your subnets and broadcast domains up as you see fit; but, also, MPLS offers great advantages over doing the same thing with a normal IP routing infrastructure.
For a start, as I mentioned above, the routers can be simpler, more reliable, cheaper, and faster.
Secondly, you can set up traffic engineering. This means that it's easy to reserve bandwidth, control prioritisation, and so on. You can set it up so that DNS and SSH traffic between your workstation LANs and your server pool has a high priority claim over the shortest route, while HTTP requests from them to the external Internet connection get the highest-capacity route. Each edge router may split traffic coming into the MPLS network based on whatever criteria it wants, then assign them to different tunnels through the MPLS network.
Thirdly, the MPLS backbone can 'heal' more rapidly than an IP routed backbone, using MPLS local protection, which enables the network to deal with a broken link or router in milliseconds rather than seconds.
Sun 1st Apr 2007 12:13 pm 
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By Ben, Sun 1st Apr 2007 @ 6:41 pm
The problem with all this stuff on a 'home' network is that there just aren't enough users to play with.
Now I've got an additional full time user on my network, stuff will be used more. So a wired network is needed (and I'm going to Gb just for fun), and I've just had to look up instructions for transfering calls on Asterisk. But even with two people, it still hasn't got the usage to really try funky stuff out.
I suppose you could always connect up the cats or something.