George Mason University's Advanced Internet Lab Tests Interoperability of MPLS Products by Avici, Cisco and Juniper.

Business/Technology Editors & Education Writers

FAIRFAX, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 26, 2000

The Advanced Internet Lab at George Mason University has completed a leading-edge code test period for the interoperability of Multi-Protocol Label Switching-Traffic Engineering products. Participating vendors were Avici Systems Inc., Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. The tests, which involved Avici's Terabit Switch Router, Cisco's 12008 Gigabit Switch Router and Juniper's M20(TM) Internet backbone router, were the first to publicly demonstrate MPLS-TE interoperability between the products.

"MPLS will have a profound effect on Internet routing architecture and data traffic engineering for the Next Generation Internet," says Bijan Jabbari, director of the laboratory and a faculty member in the department of electrical and computer engineering at George Mason's School of Information Technology and Engineering. "These test results indicate the companies understand the issues relevant to interoperability and are dealing with them effectively."

"Avici Systems recognizes the importance of demonstrating MPLS interoperability to our customers," says Chris Gunner, Avici vice president of engineering. "We believe MPLS technology will be a key technology to our customers' abilities to support new revenue-generating services and take advantage of the growth of IP data networks," he says. "AIL provides a forum to demonstrate MPLS-traffic engineering implementations from leading suppliers in the service-provider market and demonstrate their stability."

"With increasing numbers of vendors supporting MPLS, interoperability becomes a necessity in multivendor networks," says Azhar Sayeed, Cisco product manager for MPLS. "Cisco has participated successfully in several interoperability tests and will continue to do so in order to demonstrate and provide standards compliance implementations. AIL has created a forum with very comprehensive testing capabilities that checks for compliance of vendor implementations in the area of traffic engineering and other MPLS applications."

The purpose of George Mason's Advanced Internet Lab is to conduct research on high-performance, large-bandwidth Internet core networks. In addition to the initial support provided by UUNET, a WorldCom company, the lab is supported by France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Avici, Alcatel, Cisco, Ericsson, Juniper, Marconi Communications, Nortel Networks, Spirent Communications (Adtech and Netcom Systems) and Ixia.

For more information about the Advanced Internet Lab visit the web site at http://www.ail.gmu.edu.