About the White Paper:
At its inception in the mid-1990s, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) emerged as a fast-packet forwarding scheme to improve router performance. But when the advent of hardware-based routing eclipsed this use, the industry's focus shifted to applying MPLS's connection-oriented characteristics to traffic engineering in large networks. More recently, MPLS has been used for creating Layer-3 (IP-based) virtual private networks (VPNs), based on techniques defined by the IETF in RFC 2547, RFC 2764 and other documents.
Now, another application for the technology has emerged—Layer 2 VPNs. Spurred by interest among service providers, IETF specifications are being defined that spell out how Layer 2 traffic, such as Ethernet, frame relay and ATM traffic, can be transported across an MPLS network. This will allow service providers to accommodate legacy customer traffic—especially lucrative frame relay services—while moving to next-generation IP-oriented network architectures. (Free registration to Webtorials.com is required.)
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