Link Management Protocol Automatic Control Plane Configuration Extensions for Resilient Ring-based Architectures

The GMPLS paradigm pleads for a control plane clearly separated from the data plane. Decoupling control plane from the data one provides several benefits, allowing signaling information not to be disrupted upon transport plane failures. Moreover, control plane protection mechanisms are not linked with the ones used in the transport plane, which permits to protect control information with improved efficiency. Link management protocol (LMP) is presented as the best candidate to provide control channel failure detection capabilities in the GMPLS-based control plane. However, it requires the manual configuration of control channel remote IP addresses. In this paper we propose novel control channel bootstrap procedures which are compared with alternative existing ones in terms of their requirements and achieved performance. Moreover, we propose extensions to LMP Config and ConfigAck messages to allow the bootstrap of related backup control channels when bootstrapping the working ones configuring an efficient link protection scheme. The feasibility and performance of our contributions has been evaluated over the experimental ASON/GMPLS CARISMA network control plane