Service Provider & MPLS
Traffic Engineering & QoS
Making the network obey policy instead of shortest-path arithmetic: MPLS-TE tunnels that place traffic on explicitly computed paths with bandwidth reservations and fast reroute, and the QoS toolchain — classification, queuing, policing, shaping — that decides who suffers when links fill.
- read in order, or dip in
- 2 chapters
- updated 31 Aug 2026
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read in order, or dip in
updated 31 Aug 2026
Contents
- 01MPLS Traffic Engineering: RSVP-TE Tunnels ExplainedMPLS-TE steers traffic onto explicitly computed paths instead of the IGP's shortest path: the IGP is extended (OSPF-TE/ISIS-TE) to flood per-link bandwidth and attributes, headend routers run constrained SPF to find paths meeting bandwidth and affinity constraints, and RSVP-TE signals the path hop by hop, reserving bandwidth and distributing labels. Fast reroute adds pre-signalled backup tunnels that restore forwarding in tens of milliseconds.
- 02QoS Fundamentals: Classification, Queuing and PolicingQoS is the managed allocation of scarcity: classify traffic into classes, mark it once at the trust boundary (DSCP values like EF for voice and AF41 for video), then apply per-hop treatment — low-latency priority queuing for real-time traffic, weighted bandwidth shares for data classes, policing to cap rates and shaping to smooth them. Cisco's MQC (class-map, policy-map, service-policy) is the grammar for all of it.
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