PBB-TE
Provider Backbone Bridge Traffic Engineering
PBB-TE is based on the earlier PBB standard, which uses a series of identifiers to ensure that customer traffic can be kept separate and can be delivered to the correct egress point whilst transiting a service provider network. PBB-TE, as the title suggests, introduces traffic engineering into the architecture, which essentially means that prior to the customer traffic hitting the network, the route the customer traffic will take has already been preconfigured in the network. This preconfigured route will be established based on the requirements of the customer traffic, in much the same way as existing traffic engineering mechanisms. Therefore, PBB-TE is different to PBB in the sense that STP is not required and also flooding is not allowed.