The MPLS-OPS Archive

[sraghava <sraghava@vt.edu>]

Hi Faisal,
I  can try to explain some of the details here.
The flow in IPV6 is identified by the source address and the 24-bit (I am
not sure of the size.though) flow label. The intent is that a router can
decide how to route and/or process by simply looking up the flow label in a
table, without examining the rest of the header. This is where, the IPV6
label acts pretty much like the MPLS label.

I think the first trivial difference is that MPLS label is subdivided (see
http://www.mplsrc.com/faq2.shtml) and the IPV6 label is just a monolithic
identifier. The next difference is that MPLS labels can be heirarchical.
There are possibilities for label stacking. This can help directly for
VPI-VCI mapping in ATM networks. I am not aware of any heiarchical structure
for IPV6 flow field. There could be more differences.

See RFC 1809 on probable effects of IPV6 flow labeling for caching at
intermediate routers.Also see "Label Switching and IP Version 6", a paper on
the problems of using label switching with IPV6.
See
http://tina.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/edwardsc/publications/publications.h
tml for some information on using IPV6 and MPLS.
See http://www.watersprings.org/links/mlr/id/draft-baker-flow-label-00.txt
for a draft on using IPV6 flow for tag switching
Also, there is some activity in ipv6forum for trunking ipv6 over mpls.


Thanks
Srihari Raghavan
Graduate Student
Dept of CSE
Virginia Tech
=============

----- Original Message -----
From: "Faisal Naik" <linuxlist@mail.com>
To: "list mpls" <mpls-ops@mplsrc.com>
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2000 8:06 AM
Subject: difference


> Hello friends, I need to ask a thing about MPLS.
>
> Can anyone tell me the differnce or similarity between flow label field of
> Ipv6 header and label field of MPLS header?
>
> Also incase of an IPv6 network what role do each of these fields play?
>
> I hope i have made my question clear.
>
> Best Regards,
> Faisal Naik
>
>
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