Scaling the Internet with tag-switching

The explosive growth of the Internet presents a serious challenge to Internet service providers and equipment suppliers in keeping up with this growth in traffic and number of users. Tag witching technology is a key component in Cisco´s plans for meeting this challenge. Tag switching combines the performance and traffic management capabilities of Layer 2 (data link layer) switching with the proven scalability of Layer 3 (network layer) routing. Tag switching is the first technology to fully integrate routing and switching for an Internet-scale environment. This paper presents an overview of the benefits and technology of tag switching, and describes its application in service provider networks