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chapter 1
introduction

The exponential growth of the Internet over the past several years has placed a
tremendous strain on the service provider networks. Not only has there been an increase
in the number of users but there has been a multifold increase in connection speeds,
backbone traffic and newer applications. Initially ordinary data applications required only
store and forward capability in a best effort manner. The newer applications like voice,
multimedia traffic and real-time e-commerce applications are pushing toward higher
bandwidth and better guarantees, irrespective of the dynamic changes or interruptions in
the network.

To honor the service level guarantees, the service providers not only have to provide
large data pipes (which are also costlier), but also look for architectures which can
provide & guarantee QoS guarantees and optimal performance with minimal increase in
the cost of network resources.

MPLS technology enables Service Providers to offer additional services for their
customers, scale their current offerings, and exercise more control over their growing
networks by using its traffic engineering capabilities. On the other hand, Diffserv using its
scalable differentiation enables differential pricing scheme for providing differential QoS.
Putting it simply, MPLS is a switching technology used to get packets from one place to
another through a series of hops while DiffServ governs what happens to the packet at
each hop. The marriage of these two technologies, Diffserv over MPLS, provides another
interesting alternative solution to the bag of existing ones.

On the other hand, compared to Diffserv over MPLS which is still an evolving technology,
SNMP is a widely deployed network management protocol capable of catering to a large
number of device classes. SNMP, being such a widely accepted and understood
management protocol standard, can be effectively used to gather traffic characteristics
from the routers in the core network. The information gathered can be used for
provisioning and for traffic engineering by the network operators at the Network
Operating Centre (NOC).

chapter 2

1 of 2 7/30/2008 8:26 PM
MPLS Tutorial: What is MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching)? | MPLS... http://www.mplstutorial.com/mpls-tutorial-what-mpls-multi-protocol-labe...

2 of 2 7/30/2008 8:26 PM