GMPLS controlled multi-layer ethernet

This paper presents the novel idea of using a GMPLS control plane for all flavors of an IEEE 802.1Q multilayer Ethernet, applied to an access and aggregation network scenario. Such a network could provide better resilience, control of resource allocation, bandwidth guarantees and the possibility of having a unified control plane in an environment that includes more and more type of forwarding technologies. It might also be possible to reuse existing equipment and provide backward compatibility for legacy systems when deploying such a GMPLS network over an existing Ethernet based network. This was accomplished through extending GMPLS protocols by defining a new switch capability object, new label object for ML Ethernet, and the development of control plane procedures for handling scenarios specific to ML Ethernet. These extensions has been implemented and verified, along with the development of a ML Ethernet aware PCE, and the results indicates that this novel architecture is plausible and has an interesting potential.