Multi-protocol label switching has been incorporated into provider networks to provide quality of service. Owing to the design of the protocol, its ability to push and pop labels in packets, independent of their underlying protocol makes it popular in interconnecting multiple networks in to one transport pipeline. At the same time, multi-protocol label switching has proven to be a very fast procedure for forwarding devices because the central processing unit cycles required in making a forwarding decision is far less compared to traditional forwarding decision-making metrics like analyzing the internet protocol header. However, current multi-protocol label switching implementation is a complex configuration procedure and does not provide a central bird’s eye view of the network topology to network engineers. Logging in to every label switching router and loading multi-protocol label switching configurations to allow it to connect to neighboring label switching routers in the label switching path is required.

Allowing network engineers to have a central view and control of the network topology while still providing multi-protocol label switching services in a simplistic approach will make them achieve adaptive routing and traffic engineering seamlessly. This will improve quality of service and quality of experience in transport networks.