Label switching
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (June 2007) |
Label switching is a form of network relaying to overcome the problems perceived by traditional IP-table switching. Here, the switching of network packets occurs at a lower level, namely the data link layer rather than the traditional network layer.
Each packet is assigned a label number and the switching takes place after examination of the label assigned to each packet. The switching is much faster than IP-routing. New technologies such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) use label switching. ATMs which have been around for some time also use label switching at their core.
