Benefits of Future GMPLS Controlled Ethernet Switches with Tunable Laser Modules

In this paper a new GMPLS controlled optical Ethernet network architecture is proposed, where the GMPLS capable Ethernet switches equipped with tunable laser modules have full control over the wavelengths taken through the underlying dynamic optical core network. This future network architecture has main advantages providing high bandwidth, flexible and cost effective metro Ethernet services. The protocol extensions required by the introduction of Ethernet traffic engineering functions and the application of the new tunable laser technology are discussed in details. Finally, a simple quantitative study proofs the viability of the proposed architecture, and the advantages of a carrier-class end-to-end optical Ethernet solution