Status and perspectives for the optical control plane

The concept of an optical control plane is based on the premise of “lightning fast” service provisioning, enabling carriers to meet the critical needs of end customers quickly, cost-effectively, and profitably. Born during the time of rapid telecom expansion, there was great excitement regarding optical connections that could be dynamically managed for traffic engineering and bandwidth-on-demand applications, particularly in the areas of QoS, connection management, and traffic restoration after network failures. This paper provides a first assessment of industry expectations regarding optical control plane benefits and the new services being deployed, discusses factors affecting the time frame for wide-scale deployment of the ASON/GMPLS optical control plane, and provides a snapshot of the optical control plane standardization status.