Introduction to MPLS

Hi @kayoutoure

It might help to think about this the other way around, let’s say we don’t use MPLS but BGP on all P and PE routers. This means that:

* The P routers have to do a lookup in their routing tables for every destination.
* The P routers have to know about every destination…this means you’ll have to redistribute customer information into BGP.
* iBGP has to be a full mesh so if you add another P router in your network, you’ll have to establish neighbor adjacencies with all other iBGP routers. You can make your life a bit easier with route reflectors and confederations but it’s still a lot more work than configuring a router with an IGP like OSPF + MPLS.

There are a lot of different logical topologies you can run on top of MPLS. For example, services like E-line, E-tree and E-lan are also often used on top of MPLS.

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