Traffic Engineering with MPLS

Enter MPLS

During mid-to-late 1996, networking magazine articles talked about a new paradigm in the IP world—IP switching. From the initial reading of these articles, it seemed like the need for IP routing had been eliminated and we could simply switch IP packets. The company that made these waves was Ipsilon. Other companies, such as Toshiba, had taken to ATM as a means of switching IP in their Cell-Switched Router (CSR). Cisco Systems came up with its own answer to this concept—tag switching. Attempts to standardize these technologies through the IETF have resulted in combining several technologies into Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). Hence, it is not surprising that Cisco's tag switching implementation had a close resemblance to today's ...