Analysis of a GMPLS enabled hybrid optical switching network

In this paper a novel control plane for hybrid optical switching (HOS) networks is proposed. The control plane employs generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) for configuring the virtual topology, and for establishing and tearing down the label switched paths. The management of the different traffic granularities, including resource reservation and data scheduling, is yielded by the HOS control layer. Furthermore, the architecture of a node that can be managed by the proposed control plane is introduced, and a model for its power consumption evaluation is presented. The power consumption of the considered architecture is then compared with the power consumption of a current IP electronic router. Performance and power consumption of the proposed HOS network are evaluated through the use of an event-driven simulator.