Bandwidth limited by MPLS VPN Protocol

[fciscoluna]

Hi!

To my knowledge, I know that the MPLS protocol limits the bandwidth of an interface to a certain bandwidth according to the model of the router, for example a G0 / 0 interface will not have the 1 Gbps but will have the limit that MPLS establishes.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

I need to upgrade some links, for example: from 2 Mbps to 10 Mbps, so I need to know if my actual router supports the new bandwidth or I need to buy another router,

do you know about this?

Thanks

[Joseph W. Doherty]

As far as I know, the only bandwidth impact of MPLS is the bandwidth consumed by the MPLS labels.  (Much as VLAN tags will consume bandwidth.)

Unless you're using a very old or "small" router, most will support 10 Mbps.

Your question posits a 5x increase in bandwidth, if your current CPU consumption is under about 15%, you'll probably be okay.

There usually is some documentation that will provide you information on the bandwidth capacity of specific router models.  One thing to be aware of, with software based routers, their bandwidth capacity, can vary much depending the nature of your traffic and your router configuration.  For example, routers usually need to consume about the same amount of CPU per packet, so software routers can generally "push" more bandwidth consumption for larger packets vs. smaller packets.  Or, for example, if you use features that examine packets, such as ACLs, especially as the number of tests increase, the router's capacity, to forward packets, is reduced.