'extending control plane functions to the network edge in an optical transport network'

摘要

A method of extending the control plane to a network edge for a network having a transport plane for carrying subscriber traffic within end-to-end connections, and a control plane for managing at least a portion of resources of the transport plane allocated to the connections. A first set of control-plane enabled nodes of the network is designated as core nodes, each core node being operable to route subscriber traffic between a pair of neighbour core nodes in the network. A second set of control-plane enabled nodes of the network is designated as tail nodes, each tail node being connected to a core node and operating only as a source or sink of subscriber traffic into or from the network. Each core node that is connected to at least one tail node is designated as a host node. The host node is controlled to advertise summary information of its connected tail nodes to other core and tail nodes in the network, thus making it possible to extend control plane function to the tail nodes which can calculate connection routes, set-up/tear-down connections and perform connection failure recovery functions.