An interoperable GMPLS/OBS Control Plane: RSVP and OSPF extensions proposal

The GMPLS/OBS Control Plane is a bold research topic. Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks need to be capable to be rapidly reconfigured with the aim of achieving an efficient use of bandwidth, low latency and high degree of transparency. The OBS Control Plane is just a packet switched network requiring a high control complexity. The demands are clear but a well-defined control plane is still an open issue. As one of excellent candidate control plane for most of network scenarios, Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) is being taken as a reference to design such OBS Control Plane. In this paper we first describe the proposal for the interoperable GMPLS/OBS Control Plane and then based on such architecture we propose and analyze some GMPLS protocol extensions that must be done to integrate it properly into OBS networks.