Extending impairment-aware control plane solutions toward cognitive optical networks

The current GMPLS control plane suffers from a lack of physical layer details, which is essential to accurately evaluate the effect of physical layer impairments (PLIs) and decide the feasibility of a lightpath. The European Union (EU) funded DICONET project extended the GMPLS protocols to carry PLI information by proposing two control plane architectures: distributed and centralized. The architectures for these two approaches have been defined, modules have been developed, and their performance has been evaluated based on emulation for various metrics. Moreover, suggestions on protocol extensions have been submitted to IETF CCAMP. On the other hand, the network evolves to be more heterogeneous in terms of not only types of services and traffic demands but also physical layers. These new challenges addressed by the EU funded project CHRON will need new architectures, the core of which is a cognitive decision system.