MPLS Network Management

1

Introduction

“It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.”

–Winston Churchill

Introduction

In this chapter, we look at the origins of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and introduce some of its basic concepts, including the separation of the control and forwarding planes of MPLS, the Forward Equivalence Class, and the MPLS label. After this introduction, we then introduce and discuss some of the new applications of MPLS networks such as traffic engineering and virtual private networks.

After an introduction to MPLS, we explain the basic premise behind why MPLS-enabled networks need to be managed to provide scalable, usable, and most importantly profitable MPLS networks. Given ...