INTEGRATING GMPLS-ENABLED OPTICAL SWITCHES WITH LEGACY SONET SYSTEMS

摘要

Standards based control planes such as GMPLS can interoperate and extend across heterogeneous systems. Only by addressing the interoperability requirements of both legacy and next generation equipment can carriers ensure not only the success of the control plane deployment, but also improve the operational and economic efficiencies of the entire network. There are many challenges to extending legacy network equipment with an external independent control plane. But most, if not all network elements in the core network implement the minimal feature set required by a proxy control plane application. An elegant two layered architecture, composed of GMPLS proxy and network element adaptors, separates the concerns of the GMPLS functionality from issues related to the control of legacy network elements' The remaining difficulty lies in being able to precisely qualify and model complete network element behavior.