Design of a GMPLS control plane with PCE-based impairment-aware full restoration capability for translucent WSON: Enabling techniques, service demonstration, and performance evaluation

Abstract The control plane techniques based on the Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) and Path Computation Element (PCE) architectures are promising candidates for potential industrial deployment in Wavelength Switched Optical Networks (WSON), because they can greatly reduce operational expenses and improve the network intelligence. Moreover, link failures have a critical effect on WSON, since a single failure may result in the loss of a huge amount of data. In light of this, in this paper, we detail the design and implementation of a GMPLS control plane, with PCE-based, impairment-aware, full restoration capability for translucent WSON. We investigate the enabling techniques for such a PCE/GMPLS control plane by surveying a series of solutions, and, based on these enabling techniques, we present an experimental demonstration of service recovery for uncompressed video stream in a GMPLS controlled WSON with PCE-based full lightpath restoration. We also quantitatively evaluate the performance of the PCE-based full restoration, and compare it with the PCE-based pre-planned restoration and the PCE-based pre-computed dynamic restoration in terms of signaling latency and restorability. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the PCE-based full restoration is experimentally investigated on an actual GMPLS controlled WSON testbed, which is beneficial for verifying the overall feasibility and efficiency of the proposed solutions, obtaining valuable insights for its future deployment in a real operational scenario, and providing active contribution in support of the on-going Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardization activities.