OIF UNI and IETF GMPLS interoperability: An optical UNI converter

Currently there are two kinds of models for control plane, namely overlay model and peer model. Since they use similar protocols but with some differences in the usage of resource reservation protocol (RSVP) objects, overlay model and peer model cannot interwork directly. While the control plane of overlay model has been realized through automatically switched optical network (ASON) specifications by ITU-T, and ASON-based user-to-network interface (UNI) has been further standardized by optical internetworking forum (OIF) [1][2], the peer model was promoted by IETF with its generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) protocols. Judging by the on-going development, the carriers are likely to encounter the interoperability problem between the GMPLS client network and the ASON transport network. In this paper, we propose an innovative scheme of optical UNI converter to solve this problem flexibly. The UNI converter properly adjusts an OIF UNI signaling control packet to GMPLS-compliant and vice versa. The simulation result of the successful UNI interoperability between GMPLS client equipment and ASON transport equipment is shown.