Supporting virtual private dial-up services over label switching based networks

Utilizing hardware-based switching to improve the cost, performance and scalability of layer 3 routing, referred to as layer 3 switching, is one of the most prospective techniques to efficiently transfer large amounts of diverse traffic over the Internet. One of layer 3 switching implementations, referred to as label switching, is to attach short, fixed length labels to the forwarded packets. Switching entities perform table lookups based on these simple labels, instead of analyzing layer 3 headers, to determine where packets should be forwarded. For the emerging virtual private networks and the increasing number of mobile users, a virtual private dial network over a label switching architecture is addressed. The proposed scheme utilizes the feature and advantage of label switching networks and obtains a lighter overhead while supporting a virtual private dial-up service.