Over the past few years it has become evident that local computational resources cannot keep up with the demands generated by some users/applications and distributed computing using the concept of a computational Grid is proposed as the solution. An example is emerging scientific applications that couple scientific instruments, data and high-end computing resources distributed on a global scale. The interconnection of such resources can be quite a challenging task, raising strict requirements for a suitable network infrastructure. Optical networks can support this type of applications offering a large amount of low cost bandwidth and a number of relevant research activities focus on optical network infrastructures utilizing GMPLS control plane for fast and automated provisioning of connections across multi-technology and multidomain networks. PHOSPHORUS (Lambda User Controlled Infrastructure for European Research) is an FP6 EU funded Integrated Project that aims to address some of the key technical challenges to enable on-demand, end-to-end network services across multiple domains in a seamless and efficient way. More specifically, the network concept, the network control plane developments and test-beds of the project will make applications aware of their complete Grid resources (computational and networking) environment and will be able to make adaptive and optimized use of heterogeneous network infrastructures connecting various high-end resources. As part of this work, PHOSPHORUS is concentrating on the development of a common and transversal control plane for the Grid network infrastructures, in which Grid and optical network resources will be controlled by the same control plane for provisioning and recovery purposes, seamlessly spanning across different control and management domains. By introducing a set of extensions to the standard GMPLS, the developed Grid-GMPLS architecture introduces interfaces specific for Grids, resulting in a more powerful network control plane solution. In this paper we will give an overview of PHOSPHORUS and present the Grid-GMPLS control plane considerations and architecture, with focus on issues such as routing that will be implemented and demonstrated by the project.
