Abstract

The introduction of a control plane is a paramount trend in Optical Transport Networks (OTN). An automatically switched optical network (ASON) improves the network capabilities by optical channel routing, fast restoration, automatic service provisioning and flexible bandwidth management. Moreover it gives the chance to introduce self-organizing network principles in OTNs. To prevent reinventing the wheel, existing routing and signaling protocols from IP networks are reused for ASONs as much as possible. A suitable signaling protocol is Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) with the label distribution protocols CR-LDP^1,2 and RSVP-TE.^3,4 Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)⁴ is a promising approach for the routing part. Several extensions are necessary to adapt these protocols to the requirements of OTNs.^4,6

© 2002 Optical Society of America