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Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a layer-2 (upper part) virtual circuit-switching forwarding protocol that was designed to improve packet arrival time predictability (jitter reduction), speed up packet forwarding by hardware forwarding of payloads, and solve network scalability problems by traffic engineering.
MPLS has been developed for application in (wide-area) packet networks. "Multi-Protocol" refers to the fact that the same label based forwarding principle can be applied to transport different layer 2 packet technologies such as Ethernet, ATM, PPP and Frame-Relay. Thus MPLS as a networking technology is bit rate independent. The MPLS header mappings, however, are layer 2 technology dependent. MPLS label switching allows traffic from different layer 2 technologies (such as ATM, Ethernet, and PPP) to co-reside on the same wire.
When implementing G700 Media Gateways in an MPLS environment, the MPLS network should be used in series with one or more circuit-switching networks.
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