Metro Service Providers are increasingly turning to Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) to converge disparate networks and services into a unified core, maintain quality, and deliver additional value-added capabilities. MPLS for Metropolitan Area Networks addresses service providers' challenges by demonstrating solutions provided by MPLS features such as traffic engineering (TE), fast reroute, VPNs, virtual private LAN services (VPLS), and QoS.

The text opens with an overview of metro networks and MPLS, describing business opportunities and challenges and how mission-critical applications can be deployed within Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs). It then examines traffic engineering issues, focusing on fundamental TE concepts, network control, trunk attributes, constraint-based routing (CBR), Resource Reservation Protocol with TE extensions (RSVP-TE), and resource optimization.

Following a discussion on how MPLS can bring increased reliability to MANs, the author then concludes the book with a detailed analysis of the service aspect of MANs. Topics reviewed include L3 and L2 MPLS VPNs, geographically dispersed Ethernet multipoint services, virtual private LAN services (VPLS), and the integrated services (IntServ) and differentiated services (DiffServ) QoS models with respect to MPLS.

The entire book adopts a simplify-and-exemplify approach, containing a series of real-life case studies and using representative topologies as a basis for illustrating the concepts discussed in each chapter. This learning-by-example approach helps you to remember and understand the complex MPLS concepts and technologies. You can then apply what you have learned from these examples and scenarios to your specific networking environments.