MPLS Fundamentals

Benefits of MPLS

This section explains briefly the benefits of running MPLS in your network. These benefits include the following:

• The use of one unified network infrastructure

• Better IP over ATM integration

• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)-free core

• The peer-to-peer model for MPLS VPN

• Optimal traffic flow

• Traffic engineering

Consider first a bogus reason to run MPLS. This is a reason that might look reasonable initially, but it is not a good reason to deploy MPLS.

Bogus Benefit

One of the early reasons for a label-swapping protocol was the need for speed. Switching IP packets on a CPU was considered to be slower than switching labeled packets by looking up just the label on top of a packet. A router forwards an IP packet by looking up the destination ...