Research on Switched Connection and Related Control Protocol for Automatic Switched Optical Network

In recent years, the transmission technology for optical communication has been developed very rapidly. A single fiber can contain hundreds of or even thousands of wavelengths because of the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology. Moreover, a single wavelength can have a lot of bandwidth (>Gbps). Thus, a single fiber link could contain more than 1Tbps bandwidth. One of the most important challenges is how to control and utilize such huge bandwidth resource. Generalized multiple protocol label switching (GMPLS) technology was introduced into optical network to control network resources effeciently. Thus, the traditional optical network will became automatic switched optical network (ASON).With the introduction of GMPLS control plane, the optical network has three planes: management plane, control plane and transport plane, which is also called data plane. It provides the connection service for two client networks to transmit data stream by establishing end-to-end circuit switched path. The signaling protocol in the control plane is to establish and release connections, as well as provide protection and restoration functions. The control plane also contains routing algorithm and routing protocol. The routing protocol is used to collect the network topology and resource usage information. The collected information is used by routing algorithm to compute the path, which will be established by the signaling protocol. The management plane is largely simplified since the control plane is used for call/connection control.ASON network supports switched connection, which has a trend to be more and more dynamically. The GMPLS network can support dynamic connection, since it has online routing algorithm and fast signaling mechanism. In recent years, some new application need GMPLS core network to support highly dynamic connection with