Optical Signaling, Routing and Management

Introduction

Service providers continue to look to developments in Optical Signaling, Routing and Management (OSRM) technologies to provide increased network automation that will allow them to offer new, diversified services while concurrently reducing operational costs. OSRM enables the dynamic creation, maintenance and and tear down of connections within and between optical networks.

Ongoing OSRM test events at the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) are bringing together service providers and telecom equipment vendors in this emerging market to demonstrate and facilitate standards based interoperability. As part of this effort, the UNH-IOL conducted three successful Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) test events to date. GMPLS is one of several OSRM technologies that Service providers can utilize to automate the delivery and management of bandwidth how and deliver to their customers.

Test Events

Our latest interoperability test event, held July 18th-22nd, 2005, was designed with a new focus on the failure recovery mechanisms of a GMPLS network. The event provided a vendor-neutral setting that gave participants an opportunity to assess interoperability and valuable feedback to assist them in refining their implementations.

The following aspects of GMPLS have been explicitly tested to date:

- CSPF
- OSPF-TE
- RSVP-TE
- Bidirectional LSP
- Hierarchical LSP
- Graceful Deletion
- Explicit hop control
- Explicit label control
- Egress Label Control
- Protection object
- Graceful Restart
- Single layer and multi layer reoptimization
- Single layer and multi layer protection and restoration
- Bandwidth on Demand
- Cut Through
- Layer 1 VPN
- Applications over GMPLS
- Stability testing
- Scalability testing

White Papers

Following each test event, the participants and the UNH-IOL work closely to document findings and make recommendations. The following white papers are produced.

White paper for the July 2005 Test Event
White paper for the September 2004 Test Event
White paper for the January 2004 Test Event

Contacts

Kari Younsi
E-Mail: kari.younsi@iol.unh.eduu
Phone: +1-603-862-0696