An overview of IP switching and Tag switching

Both IP switching and Tag switching were recently proposed to improve the performance of IP routers. They are all based on a multi-layer label-swapping mechanism, but their implementations are quite different. In this paper, we present an overview of both switching mechanisms, compare their key features, identify their constraints, and analyze the effect of these constraints on performance. Our study shows that both IP switching and Tag switching are better than the conventional IP routing, but neither of them is universally superior to the other.