Control Plane Protection Using Link Management Protocol (LMP) in the ASON/GMPLS CARISMA Network.

In the ITU-T ASON architecture, the control plane is responsible for providing intelligence to the network. The GMPLS paradigm pleads for a separation between the control plane and the forwarding plane. If the control plane is deployed disjoint from the forwarding plane, recovery mechanisms to ensure its proper operation are required. In this paper, on one hand, a quasi-associated mode backup control channel proposal is compared with a traditional associated 1:1 protection. On the other hand, extensions to LMP defined by the IETF are presented and evaluated to address both control channel and nodal failure recovery. The merits of the proposals are assessed by experimental results. Keywords: ASON, GMPLS, LMP, protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]