Metro Ethernet

MPLS and Traffic Engineering

MPLS is strategically significant for TE because it can potentially provide most of the functionality available from the overlay model (described in the preceding section), with much better integration with IP. MPLS for TE is attractive because it enables you to do the following:

• Manually or dynamically build explicit LSPs

• Efficiently manage LSPs

• Define traffic trunks and map them to LSPs

• Associate a set of attributes with traffic trunks to change their characteristics

• Associate a set of attributes with resources that constrain the placement of LSPs and traffic trunks mapped to those LSPs

• Aggregate and deaggregate traffic (whereas IP routing only allows aggregation)

• Easily incorporate a constraint-based routing framework ...