Huawei’s Proprietary Protocols Highlighted

What is Proprietary Means:

Proprietary refers to property: things that are owned by individuals or businesses. People talk about proprietary drugs, proprietary software, and other things that can only be made and sold by those who discovered or created them. A proprietary claim is usually protected by trademark or copyright. When you say you have a proprietary right to something you're saying to everyone else: "Hands off! This is mine."

Two terms are often used in the networking industry when describing network protocols.

1) Proprietary Protocol 2) Standard Protocol

The main difference between Proprietary Protocol and Standard Protocol is that Proprietary protocols are often developed by a single vendor to use in their products. But, standard protocols are published open standards, which any vendor can use in their products.

Proprietary protocols are usually developed by a single company for the devices (or Operating systems) which they manufacture. AppleTalk is a proprietary network protocol developed by Apple Inc. AppleTalk protocol is an excellent protocol and AppleTalk protocol works well in network environments made of Apple devices. But other Operating System software vendors may not support the AppleTalk protocol. Proprietary protocols will not scale well in network environments consisting of multi-vendor Operating System software products or network devices.

Standard protocols are agreed upon and accepted by the whole computing industry. Standard protocols are not vendor-specific. Standard protocols are often developed by a collaborative effort of experts from different organizations.

Examples of standard protocols are IP, TCP, UDP, etc. RFC (Request for Comments) is an IETF platform to develop Standard Protocols.

Overview of Huawei’s Proprietary Protocols:

LNP:

The Link-type Negotiation Protocol (LNP) dynamically negotiates whether an Ethernet interface is the access or trunk interface. Huawei switches support LNP starting from V200R005.

LNP Negotiation:

Cisco’s DTP is a replacement for the LNP protocol.

VCMP:

VLAN Central Management Protocol (VCMP)

The VCMP is used to implement centralized VLAN management and maintenance. VCMP is a Huawei proprietary protocol that works at the link layer to transmit VLAN information and ensures consistent VLAN information on the Layer 2 network. Compared with manual configuration, VCMP reduces the configuration workload and ensures VLAN information consistency.

VCMP domain

A VCMP domain is composed of switches that have the same VCMP domain name and are connected through trunk or hybrid interfaces. All switches in the VCMP domain must use the same domain name, and each switch can join only one VCMP domain. Switches in different VCMP domains cannot synchronize VLAN information.

A VCMP domain specifies the scope for the administrative switch and managed switches. Switches in a VCMP domain are managed by the administrative switch. There is only one administrative switch and multiple managed switches in a VCMP domain.

VCMP role

VCMP determines attributes of switches based on VCMP roles

Typical VCMP networking:

VBST:

VBST, a Huawei spanning tree protocol, constructs a spanning tree in each VLAN so that traffic from different VLANs is forwarded through different spanning trees. VBST is equivalent to STP or RSTP running in each VLAN. Spanning trees in different VLANs are independent of each other.

Currently, there is three standard spanning tree protocols: Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP), and Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP). STP and RSTP cannot implement VLAN-based load balancing, because all the VLANs on a LAN share a spanning tree, and packets in all VLANs are forwarded along this spanning tree. In addition, the blocked link does not carry any traffic, which wastes bandwidth and may cause a failure to forward packets from some VLANs. In real-world situations, MSTP is preferred because it is compatible with STP and RSTP, ensures fast convergence, and provides multiple paths to load balance traffic.

On enterprise networks, enterprise users need functions that are easy to use and maintain, whereas the configuration of MSTP multi-instance and multi-process is complex and has high requirements for engineers' skills.

To address this issue, Huawei develops VBST. VBST constructs a spanning tree in each VLAN so that traffic from different VLANs is load-balanced along with different spanning trees. In addition, VBST is easy to configure and maintain.

VBST brings in the following benefits:

·         Eliminates loops.

·         Implements link multiplexing and load balancing and therefore improving link use efficiency.

·         Reduces configuration and maintenance costs.