A path establishment approach in an MPLS-ATM integrated environment

Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) is an advanced forwarding scheme, which allows the network to achieve the traffic engineering (TE) objectives. When two or more MPLS nodes are connected via an ATM backbone merely composed of ATM switches, it is necessary to add some mechanisms to allow the label distribution and allocation between both nodes. In this paper a solution is proposed to integrate ATM and MPLS, so that the ATM backbone will be seen as a unique MPLS node from the MPLS domain and as a consequence of that the end-to-end LSP establishment can be carried out.