Fault Tolerance and Security Issues in MPLS Networks

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is an evolving network technology that has been used to provide Traffic Engineering and high speed networking. There has been current demand on Internet Service Providers, which support MPLS technology, to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees and security. Fault tolerance is an important QoS factor that needs to be considered to maintain network survivability. It is the property of a system that continues to operate the network properly in the event of failure of some of its parts. MPLS security has been mostly considered from the VPN point of view. However, data confidentiality, integrity, and origin authentication in MPLS networks are still main security issues under discussion by many research groups. In this paper, we review and discuss different approaches proposed in literature to provide MPLS fault tolerance and security. KeywordsMPLS; fault tolerance; security