Experimental demonstration of two new GMPLS lightpath setup protocols for soft-permanent connections over Metro-DWDM DPRing implemented on EMPIRICO ASON testbed

Currently, GMPLS is being developed as a standard in order to introduce intelligence for next-generation ASON (automatically switched optical network) by means of a distributed optical control plane, allowing, among other functionalities, dynamic and real-time provisioning of high-bandwidth optical connections. The provisioning of bidirectional optical connections over unidirectional OADM (optical add drop multiplexer) rings using a distributed GMPLS-based control plane has not yet been considered in the existing literature. We present two enhancements to GMPLS signaling which allow a dynamically bidirectional lightpath setup to be requested over a unidirectional ring. These new distributed signaling schemes introduce a new concept of the label contention problem applied at wavelength sets. The paper presents and compares new strategies of label contention policies for wavelength sets, providing a significant improvement in performance evaluated in the GMPLS control plane of the EMPIRICO project testbed.