The MPLS WG Archive

[Bala Rajagopalan <braja@tellium.com>]

Kireeti Kompella wrote:

> Hi Frank,
>
> > My perspective is naive, but as I understand it, the current proposals
> > require a control link to "overlay" an optical link exactly, and for the
> > control path(s) to be associated with groups of optical links according to
> > their characteristics (i.e. bandwidth - OC-48 vs OC-192).
>
> > Some of us in the optical world, growing from the telephony (SONET/SDH)
> > world do NOT assume that this overlay occurs. We prefer to offer the
> > provider (in my case, my customer) to have management networks that are not
> > the same as the transport networks. This is because in-band signaling is not
> > yet available (though OIF is working on it) and because providers may not
> > want to dedicate a wavelength to relatively low-speed management traffic.
>
> We have the notion of separate control channels and data paths in many
> drafts.  See draft-ietf-mpls-lmp-00.txt for a brief description.
>

This is still an overlay per link (or bundle) as described above. None of the
optical IDs that I know of have dealt with a separate control network of the
telephony sort (including LMP). The reason is that we're advocating an IP control
plane
much like that between routers. So every OXC must talk to each of its
neighbors directly. Hence the overlaid control.

Regards,

Bala


--

Bala Rajagopalan
Tellium, Inc.
2 Crescent Place
P.O. Box 901
Oceanport, NJ 07757-0901
Tel: (732) 923-4237
Fax: (732) 923-9804
Email: braja@tellium.com