Existing MPLS Traffic Engineering (MPLS-TE) deployments allow for strict QoS guarantees, resources optimization, and fast failure recovery, but are limited to P2P applications. There are P2MP applications like Content Distribution, Interactive Multimedia, VPN multicast, VPLS service and Layer 2 broadcast/multicast over MPLS that would also benefit from these capabilities both in terms of TE and scaling. This clearly motivates enhancements of the base MPLS-TE toolbox in order to support P2MP applications.

This talk presents the current state of affairs for Point-to-Multipoint (P2MP) Traffic Engineering (TE) extensions to RSVP-TE and GMPLS RSVP-TE to deliver P2MP applications over a G/MPLS TE capable environment. It also discusses the challenges and trade-offs required during the development of such protocol capability (as currently driven by the IETF MPLS WG).