Telecom and Networking Test 1 Practice

Forwarding in MPLS is driven by labels that identify the next hop and the path the packet should take. An ingress router assigns a label to the packet based on its Forwarding Equivalence Class, and each Label Switch Router along the path uses that label to decide which interface to send the packet out of and which label to swap in next. This creates a precomputed Label Switched Path that guides the packet from source to destination without repeatedly inspecting the IP header. The label itself doesn’t encrypt the payload, define IP subnets, or carry TCP session state—those aspects are handled by other parts of the networking stack.