MPLS Benefits and Advantages, Network Engineers should understand MPLS. In this post, we will look at what are the benefits of deploying MPLS in the Network, and the advantages of having MPLS-enabled infrastructure. MPLS is Multi-Protocol Label Switching as you might know already. Multi-Protocol because we can carry many different types of traffic over MPLS.
Because MPLS is just a switching operation on the Mid-Label Switch Routers - LSR, and MPLS Label is 20 bits long, compared to IP which is 32 bits long with IPv4 and 128 bits long with IPv6, MPLS was considered a better performance protocol, thus allows to grow, without adding extra device resources.
Figure - MPLS Enabled Applications MPLS Layer 2 based VPNs, LDP and BGP based, then MPLS Layer 2 VPN with EVPN, Classical EVPN for both Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs, 2457-based MPLS Layer 3 VPN, Carrier Supporting Carrier, Seamless/Unified MPLS, Segment Routing, Inter-AS MPLS VPNs, GMPLS, RSVP based MPLS for Traffic Engineering, RSVP-TE FRR, SRTE and Topology Independent Loop-Free Alternate, and the list goes on.
All of the above architectures, services, and frameworks work because the underlying mechanism is MPLS. Some of them can work with other mechanisms as well but could it be secure as MPLS'?. Could they be scalable as MPLS?. Are they Multi-Protocol?.
Many different types of constrained can be defined and these are not again easily, in a scalable way possible with other technologies. Although there are many other MPLS benefits, to keep the short post, I will end the post here, but please check the other posts on the website as we have thousands of them and many also in MPLS topics.
Orhan Ergun, CCIE/CCDE Trainer, Author of Many Networking Books, Network Design Advisor, and Cisco Champion 2019/2020/2021
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