Editing Multiprotocol Label Switching (section)

==History==
* 1994: [[Toshiba_Telecommunication_Systems_Division|Toshiba]] presented Cell Switch Router (CSR) ideas to [[IETF BOF]]
* 1995: [[George Varghese]] and [[Girish  Chandranmenon]] published paper on threaded indices, a form of label switching, at [[ACM SIGCOMM]] annual conference<ref>{{citation |title = Trading Packet Headers for Packet Processing | journal = ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review| date =  October 1995 |doi = 10.1145/217391.217427| last1 = Chandranmenon| first1 = Girish P.| last2 = Varghese|author2-link=George Varghese| first2 = George| volume = 25| issue = 4| pages = 162–173}}</ref>
* 1996: Ipsilon, Cisco and IBM announced label-switching plans
* 1997: Formation of the IETF MPLS working group
* 1999: First MPLS VPN (L3VPN) and TE deployments
* 2000: MPLS Traffic Engineering
* 2001: First MPLS [[Request for Comments]] (RFC) published{{Ref RFC|3031}}
* 2002: AToM (L2VPN)
* 2004: GMPLS; Large-scale L3VPN
* 2006: Large-scale TE "Harsh"
* 2007: Large-scale L2VPN
* 2009: Label Switching Multicast
* 2011: [[MPLS-TP|MPLS transport profile]]

In 1996 a group from [[Ipsilon Networks]] proposed a ''flow management protocol''.{{Ref RFC|1953}} Their ''IP Switching'' technology, which was defined only to work over ATM, did not achieve market dominance. [[Cisco Systems]] introduced a related proposal, not restricted to ATM transmission, called ''Tag Switching''<ref>{{cite journal|doi=10.1109/5.650179|title=Tag switching architecture overview|year=1997|last1=Rekhter|first1=Y.|author1-link=Yakov Rekhter|last2=Davie|first2=B.|last3=Rosen|first3=E.|last4=Swallow|first4=G.|last5=Farinacci|first5=D.|last6=Katz|first6=D.|journal=Proceedings of the IEEE|volume=85|issue=12|pages=1973–1983}}</ref> with its Tag Distribution Protocol (TDP).<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-doolan-tdp-spec-00.txt|title=IETF - Tag Distribution Protocol (draft-doolan-tdp-spec-00)|date=September 1996|website=IETF}}</ref> It was a Cisco proprietary proposal, and was renamed ''Label Switching''. It was handed over to the [[Internet Engineering Task Force]] (IETF) for open standardization. The IETF formed the MPLS Working Group in 1997. Work involved proposals from other vendors, and development of a consensus protocol that combined features from several vendors' work.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mpls/history/|title = Multiprotocol Label Switching (mpls) WG History|website=IETF}}</ref>

Some time later it was recognized that the work on threaded indices by Girish Chandranmenon and George Varghese had invented the idea of using labels to represent destination prefixes that was central to tag switching.<ref>{{cite book|title = Computer Networks: A Systems Approach|author = L. Peterson and B. Davie|date = 2022|page = 336|url=https://book.systemsapproach.org/scaling/mpls.html}}</ref>

One original motivation was to allow the creation of simple high-speed switches since for a significant length of time it was considered impractical to forward IP packets entirely in hardware. Advances in [[VLSI]] and in forwarding algorithms have made hardware forwarding of IP packets possible and common. The current advantages of MPLS primarily revolve around the ability to support multiple service models and perform traffic management. MPLS also offers a robust recovery framework{{Ref RFC|3469}} that goes beyond the simple protection rings of [[synchronous optical networking]] (SONET/SDH).