Chapter 5. Forwarding Traffic Down Tunnels

Chapter 3, "Information Distribution," covered information distribution through OSPF and IS-IS. Chapter 4, "Path Calculation and Setup" covered path calculation (CSPF) and path setup (RSVP).

If you have done everything in Chapters 3 and 4 successfully, at this point, any tunnel interface you have created comes up. But after a tunnel is up, what do you do with it?

You can use three methods to forward traffic down a tunnel interface:

• Static routes

• Policy routing

• Autoroute

This chapter covers these three methods, as well as information about load sharing across MPLS TE tunnels. Included is one of MPLS TE's more attractive properties—the capability to do fine-grained unequal-cost load sharing of traffic.