Virtual private dial-up services over multi-protocol label switching networks

Utilizing hardware-based switching to improve the cost, performance and scalability of layer 3 routing, referred to as layer 3 switching, is one of the most prospective techniques to efficiently transfer large amounts of diverse traffic over the Internet. One of the layer 3 switching implementations, referred to as label switching, involves attaching short, fixed length labels to forwarded packets. Switching entities perform table lookups based on these simple labels, instead of analyzing layer 3 headers, to determine where packets should be forwarded. For the emergence of virtual private networks and the increase in the number of mobile users, a virtual private dial network over a label switching architecture is proposed. The proposed scheme utilizes the features and advantages of label switching networks and obtains a lighter overhead while supporting a virtual private dial-up service. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.