Service providers and large enterprises face stiff challenges: the network infrastructure and their operations are growing at tremendous pace and becoming complex. IP/MPLS networks have become operation intensive because of their complex implementations. Service providers feel the added pressure of falling revenues and stiff competition by the over-the-top providers as well as the challenge to innovate. These drivers make the network owners think about a transport technology that can provide convergence across layers, domains and offload the complexities in the networks today.

One of these technologies is Segment Routing (SR), which has caught the attention of the network planners because of its potential to simplify and unify the transport layer. It is a source-based routing technology that enables IP/MPLS and IPV6 networks to run more simply and scale more easily. Segment Routing eliminates resource-heavy signaling protocols of MPLS and moves intelligence to the source/edge of the traffic thus removing complexity from the network. In the IPV6 networks, SR opens new possibilities of network programming and opens new avenues of flexibility, control and feature-rich use cases.