Tendências de Padronização de Arquiteturas e Protocolos de Redes Ópticas DOI: 10.14209/jcis.2005.9

The main objective of this work is to analyze the evolution trends for the architecture of optical networks, discuss the state of the art for the protocols required for its development and evaluate the various efforts being carried out by different institutions as the ITU (International Telecommunications Union), lETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and OIF (Optical Internetworking Forum) in order to achieve standardization. Optical networks arose in the early eighties with the use of the monomode fiber optic cables and were further developed with the introduction of a new technological base composed by new types of optical fibers, optical amplifiers, DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) systems and optical components such as add/drop multiplexers and optical cross-connects. The introduction of these components will make possible the evolution from the simple point-to-point WDM connections to the all optical networks. In this work we analyze how the applications will interact with this physical layer. Such interaction has been demonstrated to be a challenge within the framework of the current architecture of data networks, aiming at offering solutions for the transport of a great volume of traffic in an efficient manner. With this goal in mind, the use of technologies such as MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) and its evolution, the generalized MPLS (GMPLS) is discussed. Finally, we present the in progress lTV version for the architecture optical networks, addressing its merging with the GMPLS.