Multilink Bundles Overview

The J-series Services Router supports MLPPP and MLFR multilink encapsulations. MLPPP enables you to bundle multiple PPP links into a single multilink bundle, and MLFR enables you to bundle multiple Frame Relay data-link connection identifiers (DLCIs) into a single multitlink bundle. Multilink bundles provide additional bandwidth, load balancing, and redundancy by aggregating low-speed links, such as T1, E1, and serial links.

You configure multilink bundles as logical units or channels on the link services interface ls-0/0/0:

• With MLPPP and MLFR FRF.15, multilink bundles are configured as logical units on ls-0/0/0—for example, ls-0/0/0.0 and ls-0/0/0.1.
• With MLFR FRF.16, multilink bundles are configured as channels on ls-0/0/0—for example, ls-0/0/0:0 and ls-0/0/0:1.

After creating multilink bundles, you add constituent links to the bundle. The constituent links are the low-speed physical links that are to be aggregated. You can create 64 multilink bundles on a Services Router, and on each multilink bundle you can add up to 8 constituent links. The following rules apply when you add constituent links to a multilink bundle:

• On each multilink bundle, add only interfaces of the same type. For example, you can add either T1 or E1, but not both.
• Only interfaces with a PPP encapsulation can be added to an MLPPP bundle, and only interfaces with a Frame Relay encapsulation can be added to an MLFR bundle.
• If an interface is a member of an existing bundle and you add it to a new bundle, the interface is automatically deleted from the existing bundle and added to the new bundle.

For information about configuring MLPPP bundles, see Configuring an MLPPP Bundle. For information about configuring MLFR bundles, see Configuring MLFR FRF.15 Bundles and Configuring MLFR FRF.16 Bundles.