Hosts and routers that support both MPLS and RSVP-TE can associate labels with RSVP-TE flows. When MPLS and RSVP-TE are combined, the definition of a flow can be made more flexible. Once an LSP is established, the traffic through the path is defined by the label applied at the ingress node of the LSP. The mapping of label to traffic can be accomplished using a variety of criteria. The set of packets that are assigned the same label value by a specific node are considered to belong to the same Forwarding Equivalence Class (FEC) that defines the RSVP-TE flow.
For use with MPLS, RSVP-TE already has the resource reservation component built in, making it ideal to reserve resources for LSPs.