Hands-On Lab Shows How ECMP Splits Network Traffic Across Equal-Cost Paths

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A new Protocol Lab tutorial explains Equal-Cost Multipath (ECMP) routing, which distributes traffic across multiple network paths that share the same routing cost. The lab uses two routers connected by parallel links running eBGP, with the BGP 'maximum-paths 2' setting allowing both links to be active simultaneously. A key lesson demonstrated is the difference between L3 and L4 hashing policies: L3 hashing routes all flows sharing the same source and destination IP onto a single link, leaving the other idle, while L4 hashing uses port numbers to spread flows more evenly. The hands-on exercise runs 16 parallel TCP flows using iperf3 inside Docker containers managed by containerlab, making the hashing behavior directly observable. The freely available lab material, including topologies, configurations, and scripts, is hosted on GitHub as part of the broader Protocol Lab series.

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