GMPLS: IP-Centric Control Protocols for Optical Networks(Tutorial)

Recent advances in optical networking technologies, particularly DWDM and MEMS, promise the transmission and switching of huge bandwidth capacity. The carriers have convinced of that their revenue must be earned from efficient bandwidth management instead of unsophisticated increase in capacity. The distributed control plane can offer more flexibility, reliability and scalability, whose functions include addressing, resource and topology discovery, route computation, provisioning and restoration. Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS), an IP-centric control plane, inherit the best features of IP and ATM technologies in terms of QoS and traffic engineering. Besides, GMPLS introduces enhancements to the existing IP routing and signaling protocols by supporting not only packet switching networks (IP) and frame/cell switching networks (ATM), but also networks that perform switching in time (e.g. SDH/SONET, PDH, G.709), wavelength (lambdas), and space (fiber) domain.