The internet has grown considerably over the last few years
, which puts a lot of strain on the network. The number of users is increasing as well as their needs and requirements. All the new applications like multimedia require higher bandwidth and high speed of data transfer. The increased number of users has also resulted in network traffic congestion which is hampering the flow of network. Therefore the service providers have to use a mechanism which will enable them to offer new services while keeping track of the existing services and also manage the network traffic.That mechanism is multi protocol label switching or MPLS. It can be considered as a distribution protocol. MPLS is a mechanism designed for carrying the data from one network connecting point or node to another network. In this telecommunications system all the data packets are labeled.
The source point and the destination points of the MPLS are also called as label edge routers. The service providers using MPLS are able to offer many advanced services at no extra expenditure for new infrastructure as MPLS utilizes the existing infrastructure. It is not dependent on any specific access technology. It can be used to any network protocol for e.g. Internet Protocol that is the reason it is called as multi protocol. It helps in increasing the speed of the network traffic and makes the network management easier. While transferring data packets, a specific route or path is assigned to them. Each data packet is labeled for identification so that it is not necessary for a router to look for the destination address of the data packet. Using MPLS enables the device to forward almost all the data packets at the switching level that is at Layer 2. In Multi Protocol Label Switching, the transfer of data is done on label switched paths. The LSP are nothing but an identification labels for data packets at each connecting point on the route from the source address to the destination address. The MPLS allows the service providers maneuvering room to manage the network traffic despite the congestion in network, failure in link and bottlenecks in network flow.