A control channel management method for creating a reliable and stable control plane for GMPLS-based optical transport networks

This paper primes a control channel management method for GMPLS-based optical transport networks. The proposed mechanism bundles multiple control channels between adjacent nodes into a single ldquologicalrdquo control channel to hide control channel failure from the control plane signaling and routing protocols such as RSVP TE and OSPF-TE The proposed method is based on three ideas: multiple redundant control channels, a keep-alive mechanism, and control plane virtualization. The proposed method is implemented using the standard link management protocol (LMP). The performance of the proposed method is evaluated.