The MPLS WG Archive

["Robert Streijl" <rstreijl@telcordia.com>]

Hi,

I am fairly new to MPLS and I am currently reading through the produced drafts.
I bumped into Type Length Values used for encoding.
I started with the architecture and then started reading the LDP spec, but I
still don't get it.

I understand that LDP PDUs can contain multiple messages. I also understand that
there are different message types, but I don't understand the role of TLVs.
The TLVs show byte allocations, so I am wondering if it goes in the LDP PDU or
LDP messages. First I thought it is appended to the LDP PDU header, then I
thought it is one of the fields in each of the messages. However, the TLV
messages are bigger than the reserved space in the LDP messages.

Is this encoding information somehow stored in a different way, not in the LDP
messages/PDUs?

Can somebody please help me understand this?

Thanks very much in advance.

Regards,
Robert