New Schemes for Connection Establishment in GMPLS Environment for WDM Networks

Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) is growing in popularity as a set of protocols for provisioning and managing core optical networks. In this paper, we present new schemes for provisioning lightpaths in WDM optical network. We first propose a path selection scheme required for deploying lightpaths in GMPLS environment. When a request for lightpath arrives at a source LSR, in GMPLS it is required to send request messages from an upstream LSR to the downstream LSR for setting up a lightpath. Therefore it is needed that an appropriate route be selected through the optical network for the requested lightpath. Keeping in mind its signaling characteristics we describe a path selection algorithm that can be built on GMPLS to enhance its performance. We next propose a path setup scheme for setting up the connection using the path selected with our earlier scheme. The lookahead approach of our path set up scheme enables it to work faster than existing GMPLS path setup protocols. We performed extensive simulation and found that the blocking probability of the WDM networks in GMPLS environment is lower when using our schemes than with the existing standard protocols.