Architecture in SPCOR covers service provider design: transport and mobility architectures, network software and virtualization (NFV), QoS architecture, and infrastructure security. It frames the platforms and models the rest of the exam builds on.
Segment Routing (SR) is a source-routing architecture that encodes the forwarding path as a list of segments in the packet header; segment identifiers are distributed by the IGP (SR-MPLS labels) or carried as IPv6 SIDs in SRv6, and can be programmed via BGP or PCEP.
SRv6 is Segment Routing over IPv6, encoding segments as IPv6 addresses in an SRH so the network needs no separate MPLS control plane.
MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) forwards packets using labels rather than IP lookups, enabling traffic engineering and VPNs across a provider core.
L3VPN (MPLS Layer 3 VPN) is the service that uses VRFs and MP-BGP to carry isolated customer routes across a shared provider backbone.
Virtual Private Wire Service (VPWS) is a point-to-point Layer 2 VPN carried over an MPLS/SR core using pseudowires.
Ethernet VPN (EVPN) is a BGP-based control plane for Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN services, increasingly replacing legacy L2VPN.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) exchanges routing between autonomous systems and carries VPN and label information via its multiprotocol extensions.
IS-IS is a link-state IGP widely used in service provider cores for its scalability and clean support of Segment Routing extensions.
OSPF is a link-state IGP that provider networks use for internal routing and SR label distribution.
Quality of Service (QoS) in a provider network classifies and schedules traffic to honor SLAs across the core using DiffServ and MPLS EXP/traffic-class marking.
Multicast efficiently delivers one-to-many traffic using PIM and, in providers, multicast VPN (mVPN) over the MPLS/SR core.
NETCONF is an XML-based protocol for programmatically configuring devices using YANG data models.
YANG is the data-modeling language that defines the structure of configuration and operational data used by NETCONF, RESTCONF, and telemetry.
Model-Driven Telemetry (MDT) streams operational data from devices based on YANG models, replacing pull-based SNMP polling for real-time assurance.
Architecture in SPCOR covers service provider design: transport and mobility architectures, network software and virtualization (NFV), QoS architecture, and infrastructure security.