Manual

Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol Version 3
Information About Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol Version 3
13
Cisco IOS Releases 12.0(29)S and 12.2(25)S
L2TPv3 Header Description
The migration from UTI to L2TPv3 also requires the standardization of the UTI header. As a result, the
L2TPv3 header has the new format shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 L2TPv3 Header Format
Each L2TPv3 packet contains an L2TPv3 header that includes a unique session ID representing one
session and a variable cookie length. The L2TPv3 session ID and the Tunnel Cookie field length are
assigned via the CLI. See the section “How to Configure Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol Version 3” for more
information on the CLI commands for L2TPv3.
Session ID
The L2TPv3 session ID is similar to the UTI session ID, and identifies the session context on the
decapsulating system. For dynamic sessions, the value of the session ID is selected to optimize the
context identification efficiency of the decapsulating system. A decapsulation implementation may
therefore elect to support a smaller session ID bit field. In this L2TPv3 implementation, an upper value
for the L2TPv3 session ID was set at 023. The L2TPv3 session ID value 0 is reserved for use by the
protocol. For static sessions, the session ID is manually configured.
Note The local session ID must be unique on the decapsulating system and is restricted to the least
significant ten bits.
Session Cookie
The L2TPv3 header contains a control channel cookie field that is similar to the UTI control channel key
field. The control channel cookie field, however, has a variable length of 0, 4, or 8 bytes according to the
cookie length supported by a given platform for packet decapsulation. The control channel cookie length
can be manually configured for static sessions, or dynamically determined for dynamic sessions.
The variable cookie length does not present a problem when the same platform is at both ends of an
L2TPv3 control channel. However, when different platforms interoperate across an L2TPv3 control
channel, both platforms need to encapsulate packets with a 4-byte cookie length.
Pseudowire Control Encapsulation
The L2TPv3 pseudowire control encapsulation consists of 32 bits (4 bytes) and contains information
used to sequence L2TP packets (see the section “Sequencing”) and to distinguish AAL5 data and OAM
cells for AAL5 SDU mode over L2TPv3. For the purposes of sequencing, only the first bit and bits 8 to
31 are relevant.
103361
IP Delivery Header (20 bytes)
Protocol ID: 115
Layer 2 Payload
L2TPV3 Header consisting of:
Session ID (4 bytes)
Cookie (0, 4, or 8 bytes)
Pseudowire Control Encapsulation
(4 bytes by default)