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At the entry of a MPLS tunnel, which packet fields are used to determine the label of an incoming packet?

Here it says that there are other attributes that are taken into account besides the IP destination address, without specifying what else exactly:

Ingress routers at the edge of the MPLS network classify each packet potentially using a range of attributes, not just the packet's destination address, to determine which LSP to use. Inside the network, the MPLS routers use only the LSP labels to forward the packet to the egress router.

Ricky Robinson
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1 Answers1

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Good question, possibly better served on the Network Engineering beta SE site.

As far as I know the RFC's don't specify what attributes an LSR takes into account to form the label inside the MPLS-SHIM. (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3031.txt?number=3031) ...However LDP (label distribution protocol) which is typically the protocol used to determine the MPLS label has it's own RFC (3036) found here: http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc3036 but even there I don't see a specification on what attributes are required/optional to determine a label ID.

For instance Juniper's attributes it takes into account are found here: http://www.juniper.net/techpubs/en_US/junose14.3/information-products/topic-collections/swconfig-bgp-mpls/index.html?topic-49178.html

Reading the RFCs it looks like they allow for either static or dynamic labeling to setup the label as long as the downstream routers can understand the label and match it to the appropriate NHLFE (otherwise the norm is to discard the packet). The dynamic ones use standards like LDP (label distribution protocol), BGP, or RSVP.

TheCleaner
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