Foreword
Tag Switching, the Cisco proprietary technology that evolved into MPLS began in March 1996. At that time, several major ISPs were operating two-tiered networks in order to manage the traffic in their network. You see, IP always takes the shortest path to a destination. This characteristic is important to the scalability of the Internet because it permits routing to be largely an automatic process. However, the shortest path is not always the fastest path or the most lightly loaded. Furthermore, in any non-traffic-engineered network, you find a distribution of link utilizations, with a few links being very heavily loaded and many links being very lightly loaded. You end up with many network users competing for the resources of the busy ...
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