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A detailed analysis and practical guide to Multiprotocol Label Switching, MPLS: Technology and Applications does a good job of explaining why you'd want to deploy MPLS on your network, before it gives you the details on how to go about the task. The authors, two senior Cisco Systems engineers who are involved directly in the development of MPLS standards and equipment, explain the problems that are inherent in providing IP routing service over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) links, and show how MPLS does its job. Also, they helpfully discuss emerging ways of providing Virtual Private Network (VPN) services with MPLS. Throughout, the focus is on minimizing network traffic, optimizing routing, and generally using the MPLS toolkit to solve otherwise difficult networking problems. This is a book as much about traffic engineering as any specific technology. Coverage suffers a bit from a shortage of flow charts, state diagrams, and conceptual drawings. Readers are expected to decode some very long, very dense passages of text without assistance. On the other hand, they are assumed also to know relatively little. MPLS concepts that are probably new to most readers are explained carefully and connected to more familiar internetworking terms and concepts. This book deals with MPLS comprehensively, adequately preparing the network administrator to implement better traffic management. --David Wall Topics covered: Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), treated comprehensively, both IP-switching and tag-switching approaches to label switching, and the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP). Quality of Service (QoS) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) coverage give the book some practical flavor.