SIGNALING REQUIREMENTS FOR LCAS BASED APPLICATIONS

摘要

Requirements to efficiently transport data traffic over SONET/SDH networks have driven the development of several improvements to the existing ITU-T/ANSI standards. Virtual Concatenation (VCAT), Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS) and Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) are the key elements of the new suite of SONET/SDH standards. LCAS, the newest of these standards, defines a mechanism to modify the size of virtually concatenated tributary groups (typically used to carry data traffic) in a hitless fashion. This ability to dynamically modify SONET/SDH tributary groups is useful in several applications, many of which require a complementary signaling protocol that works in concert with LCAS. This paper describes some of these applications and the requirements for an LCAS-based protocol suite that addresses these problems.