Cisco chimes in on MPLS futures

Transport enhancements may make it more palatable to certain service providers

Cisco, through its Tag Switching innovation in the 1990s, helped create MPLS, one of the most successful packet-based technologies over the past decade. But the company, industry and standards organizations are not done tweaking the protocol, according to this report from colleague Brad Reed.

A key enhancement coming down the pike is MPLS-TP, which stands for Transport Profile. This extension, being hammered out in the IETF, is intended to optimize MPLS for TDM-based optical and transport networks by allowing them to take advantage of MPLS QoS and fast reroute capabilities. This may make MPLS more appealing to transport service providers who have been reluctant to embrace it thusfar because they felt MPLS OA&M deprived them of some control of their networks, says Mike Capuano, director of service provider marketing at Cisco.

Capuano says MPLS-TP will allow these operators to manually provision MPLS tunnels and perform other TDM-like control and operational functions with the technology, according to Reed's report.

Enhancements are alo being made to MPLS to better tie it into 4G LTE mobile networks. IP and Ethernet are being positioned as the backhaul technologies of choice for 4G networks, and MPLS traffic engineering could be a useful capability for that application as a way to ensure service quality and priority for delay sensitive traffic.

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• Cisco
• IETF
• MPLS
• service provider