Application of the Link Management Protocol to Discovery and Forwarding Adjacencies

The link management protocol (LMP) is used to maintain control channel connectivity, to verify the physical connectivity of data channels, to correlate link property information at both endpoints of a data link and to aggregate multiple data links into a single traffic engineering (TE) link. LMP also provides assistance in fault localization, both in opaque and transparent optical networks. In this paper, we show how LMP relates to the generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) suite of protocols and integrates into a distributed GMPLS control plane. We describe the role of LMP in two applications: data link (auto-)discovery and the establishment of forwarding adjacency label-switched paths (FA-LSPs) including their initiation, verification and bundling, and conclude that they can be built upon basic functions of LMP, namely control channel management, link verification and link property correlation.