The present invention relates to a control system and communications systems that make it possible to transport traffic in a connection-oriented mode using the network infrastructure (30) and hardware of a traditionally connectionless network (34). According to the invention a traditionally connectionless network is complemented with a connection-oriented control plane (37). A subset (38b) of the address space (38) that in a connectionless network is used to define destination addresses is reserved for connection-oriented transport and is used to define path labels. An advantage of the invention is that an inexpensive Ethernet infrastructure (30) can be used for implementing a connection-oriented network (35).