Traffic Engineering with MPLS

Load Sharing

Equal-Cost Load Sharing

Load sharing can be done based on the packet's source and destination IP addresses or on a per-packet basis. Load sharing on the packet's source and destination addresses is often called (somewhat accurately) per-flow or per-destination load sharing, but it is more correctly called per-src-dest load sharing.

With MPLS and per-src-dest load sharing, when a packet enters the router, the packet underneath the label stack is examined. If the underlying data is an IP packet, it is load shared using the source and destination IP addresses of the underlying data, just like the router would do if it had received an unlabeled IP packet in the first place. If the packet underneath the received label stack is not an ...