Class Based Forwarding (CBF) is a means for steering IP traffic into colored tunnels based on the ingress DSCP values.  CBF may be used with SR-TE Policy or RSVP-TE colored tunnels.

RSVP-TE, the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) for Traffic Engineering (TE), is used to distribute MPLS labels for steering traffic and reserving bandwidth. The Label Edge Router (LER) feature implements the headend functionality, i.e., RSVP-TE tunnels can originate at an LER which can steer traffic into the tunnel.