What is TE

Advanced service oriented routing and forwarding schemes are nurturing fast recently, thus paving the way to implementations that can overcome complications related to multi-vendor networking environments. Some of these proposals are improving and optimizing the existing traffic engineering functionalities where the forwarding planes are still under a distributed signaling control system, others are more network architecture level changes where the forwarding plane is totally centralized controlled through a centralized control plane. At the same time some of these proposals are the hybrid of the both. This chapter describes these advances by focusing on the aspects of forwarding scheme changes introduced in each of these areas.