There are three attributes of a UNI that effect the type of service(s) that can be defined at the User-Network Interface (UNI):
- Service Multiplexing – A UNI can be defined to terminate exactly one service or multiple Ethernet Services. If the Service Multiplexing attribute has the value YES (enabled) then multiple Ethernet Services can terminate at the UNI. If Service Multiplexing has the value NO (disabled), then only one Ethernet Service can terminate at the UNI.
If Service Multiplexing is allowed at the UNI, the there needs to be a way to associate incoming frames with specific services. The MEF services use the Customer Edge VLAN ID (CE-VLAN ID) as the way to do this. The next two parameters define some attributes of how the CE-VLAN IDs can be mapped to services.
- Bundling – If Service Multiplexing is enabled, the the CE-VLAN ID is used to determine which frames are mapped to which Ethernet Services. If the Bundling attribute has the value YES (enabled) then multiple CE-VLAN IDs can be associated with an Ethernet Service at the UNI. If the Bundling attribute has the value No (disabled) then each Ethernet Service at the UNI can be associated with only one CE-VLAN ID.
- All-to-One Bundling – This is a special case of bundling in which, when enabled, all CE-VLAN IDs are mapped to one Ethernet Service.
These three attributes are inter-related:
(Service Multiplexing = YES) ↔ (All-To-One Bundling = NO)
If multiple services can terminate at the UNI then you can't have all CE-VLAN IDs mapped to a single Ethernet Service and vice versa.
(Bundling = YES) → (All-to-One Bundling = NO)
Being able to map multiple individual CE-VLAN IDs to a single service is different than mapped all CE-VLAN IDs to a single service. So these two parameters cannot both be enabled. Note that the other direction is not a requirement, i.e. if All-To-One Bundling is NO, Bundling can be YES or NO. But,
(All-to-One Bundling = YES) → (Bundling = NO)
Mapping all CE-VLAN IDs to a single service is different from being able to map multiple individual CE-VLAN IDs to a single service.
Bottom line is that Bundling and All-to-One Bundling cannot both be YES at a UNI, but they can both be NO.
Based on the definitions and rules in the left column, here are the combinations of the three attributes.
Service Multiplex-ing | Bundling | All-to-One Bundling | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| YES | NO | NO | Multiple services allowed at the UNI, but only one CE-VLAN ID mapped to each service. |
| YES | YES | NO | Multiple services allowed at the UNI and multiple CE-VLAN IDs can be mapped to each service. |
| YES | YES | YES | Illegal configuration |
| YES | NO | YES | Illegal configuration |
| NO | NO | YES | Single "private" service at the UNI. |
| NO | YES | NO | Illegal configuration |
| NO | YES | YES | Illegal configuration |
| NO | NO | NO | Illegal configuration |