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2.10. Explicit Routed LSPs

 

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When administrative policies or traffic engineering are required to be applied, it is better to use explicit routing instead of hop-by-hop routing.
 
Tunnels
 
When the network administrator requires to forward certain classes of traffic along certain pre-specified paths, where these paths are different from the currently used hop-by-hop path, MPLS allows this by means of Explicit Routed LSP Tunnels. This case, we need:
 
  1. A means of selecting the packets that are to be sent into the tunnel;
     
  2. A means of setting up the tunnel;
     
  3. A means of ensuring that packets sent into the tunnel will not loop from the receiver to the sender endpoints.
To put a packet into the tunnel, the sender endpoint first replace the label value at the top of the stack with a label value that was distributed to it by the tunnel's receive endpoint. Then, it pushes on the label which correspond to the tunnel itself, i.e., those that was distributed to it by the next hop along the tunnel. To allow this, the tunnel endpoints should be explicit label distribution peers. The label bindings they exchange are of no interest to the LSRs along the tunnel.
 
Important keywords to understand and remember
 
  Explicit Routed LSP Tunnel