Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is an ISP-provided networking service that uses labels to switch traffic between sites faster than traditional IP routing. It supports flexible site connectivity, quality of service prioritization, and full-mesh topology without additional physical links.
MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching)
Another common protocol out there is MPLS, or multi-protocol labeled switching. It's a service that internet service providers provide for their customers, so it's something that a business would subscribe to.
Let's take a look at a scenario here. Let's say this is a network provider's network, and this is a network we don't really have control over - we're actually subscribed to a service, and we're subscribed to the service through a company that has multiple sites, so we are connected into this network at multiple locations.
When a packet gets routed - let's say we want a packet that's getting routed from the headquarters office to maybe some sort of satellite campus down here - what's going to happen is that packet's going to come into the router, and then it's going to get forwarded on to the next hop, and then to the next hop, and then to the next hop, and then to its final destination.
All along the way here these are layer 2 networks, so that layer one and layer two gets pulled away and a new layer one and two gets formed for every single connection along here. Also it has to take a look at that layer three and pull out the destination IP address, look it up in the routing table, it needs to decrement the time to live, it needs to recalculate that checksum that's in there for accuracy. So it's got a lot that it needs to do for these packets.
Multi-protocol label switching is a type of switching, so it operates quite a bit differently. One thing to note about this is it's not really layer two, because it can go across a lot of different types of links here, but it's also not layer three, in that it's not doing routing - it's doing switching here.
So what does that look like? What happens is that when the information comes into the router, it gets tagged with a label, hence the label part of this. Then all these routers here along the way will actually forward that traffic based off of this label. It's actually much faster to do it this way, rather than digging into the layer three and doing the decrementing the time to live and all of that stuff. It's just using these labels to switch at a much faster pace to get to its location.
There are several advantages to MPLS. Number one: let's say over here our headquarters office, maybe we have a connection here, and maybe over here at this satellite campus we don't have access, so maybe we have to use DSL or some sort of slower connection here. Well, MPLS allows us to really deal with whatever is available to us, whatever resources, so it still allows us to have any kind of site connectivity to this network.
It also has this switching involved with it, and since it's switching we have a quality of service. So we can tag the traffic as it comes into it with a label that's specifically for voice, and it gets prioritized to the end route, and it can be much faster because of that. So we've got quality of service that we have there.
Another thing too is we can create a full mesh without any extra lines here. So we can create connectivity from all of these different sites really easily, and we can have that full mesh.
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