Status of This Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

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In recent years, significant work has been completed on traffic engineering enhancements to the generalized multiprotocol label switching protocol suite [1][2][3]. As a next step, reproducing the current trend of switching layers' integration happening in the data plane, network control is foreseen to go beyond the traditional per layer approach and tend toward an integrated model [4,5]. In these multilayer environments, a single GMPLS control plane drives various distinct switching layers at the same time and as a coherent whole, taking benefit from the "common" property of GMPLS. Beyond this application of supporting network control across different technologies, in this article we catalog the unified traffic engineering paradigms, discuss their applicability, and present their enforcement techniques. Furthermore, we show that the common GMPLS concept has the advantage of low operational complexity, and enables unified TE capabilities such as efficient network resource usage and rapid service provisioning.

This document describes the Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) behavior of currently deployed MPLS networks. This document makes best practice recommendations for anyone defining an application to run over an MPLS network that wishes to avoid the reordering that can result from transmission of different packets from the same flow over multiple different equal cost paths. These recommendations rely on inspection of the IP version number field in packets. Despite the heuristic nature of the recommendations, they provide a relatively safe way to operate MPLS networks, even if future allocations of IP version numbers were made for some purpose.