New technologies based on Label Switching, recently proposed, have been developed as a result of various motives. These approaches represent the next generation switching networks. The most popular ones are the Cell Switching Router (CSR) from Toshiba, IP Switching from Ipsilon, Tag Switching from Cisco and Aggregate Route Based IP Switching (ARIS) from IBM. All of them are based on the switching mechanism called Label Swapping, but each implementation is quite different from the others. They all enable Network Service Providers to solve many of the issues that they struggle today. These issues include the explosive growth of the Internet and the requisite scalability of service provider networks, the ability to offer Quality of Service (QoS) to enable voice, video, and multimedia applications over IP, and to offer differentiated services such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). This paper aims to show some of the main characteristics of Label Switching, in addition, it presents a global view of all approaches mentioned above, differences and comparisons among their key aspects.Label Swapping, the same technique that, not coincidentally, is used to forward data in ATM switches.Unlike ATM, all Label Switching techniques strive to maintain the control paradigm of the IP (Figure 1). They use the IP addresses and standard Internet routing protocols. Thus, in many aspects, they combine the best of ATM with the best of IP, like it was mentioned above. There are also many significant differences among the approaches, such as the use of either data or control traffic to drive the establishment of forwarding state.The standard in this area, which has been defined by the IETF, is called MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching). It is a neutral term to refer to these techniques.