Introduction To MPLS
What is MPLS? M ulti P rotocol L abel S witching : Multiprotocol: supports any network layer protocol, i.e. IPv4, IPv6, IPX, CLNP, etc. Label: a short label of fixed length is used to encapsulate packets. Switching: packets are forwarded by LABEL switching instead of by IP switching. The initial Motivation of MPLS was in mid 90s, IP address lookup was considered more complex and taking long time to process. => A label-swapping protocol was the need for speed. MPLS can allow core routers to switch packets based on some simplified header. But, hardware of routers became better and looking up longest best match was no longer an issue. More importantly, MPLS de-couples forwarding from routing, and support multiple service models. What mpls does offer in traffic processing in the simplest version IP the Traffic Engineering was processed by calculating the shortest path but in MPLS the Traffic Engineering was Dtermined from the source (Sending) based on additional parame...