Wavelength switched optical network (WSON) is a type of

telecommunications network A telecommunications network is a group of nodes interconnected by telecommunications links that are used to exchange messages between the nodes. The links may use a variety of technologies based on the methodologies of circuit switching, mes ...

. A WSON consist of two planes: the data and the control planes. The data plane comprises

wavelength-division multiplexing In fiber-optic communications, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) is a technology which multiplexes a number of optical carrier signals onto a single optical fiber by using different wavelengths (i.e., colors) of laser light. This techniq ...

(WDM) fiber links connecting

optical cross-connect {{unreferenced, date=February 2008 An optical cross-connect (OXC) is a device used by telecommunications carriers to switch high-speed optical signals in a fiber optic network, such as an optical mesh network. There are several ways to realize ...

(OXCs) through a comb of several tens of wavelength channels, with typical data rates of 10 or 40 Gbit/s. Optical end-to-end connections (i.e., lightpaths) are established in the optical domain and switched by OXCs at the wavelength granularity. The dynamic provisioning and maintenance of lightpaths is managed by the control plane. The control plane is implemented on a separate network and typically employs one network controller for each node in the data plane, as shown in the figure. The

Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) is a protocol suite extending MPLS to manage further classes of interfaces and switching technologies other than packet interfaces and switching, such as time-division multiplexing, layer-2 switchin ...

(GMPLS) protocol suite, the de facto standard control plane for WSONs proposed by the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and ...

, is composed of three protocols.A. Farrel and I. Bryskin, "GMPLS architecture and applications," The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking, 2006.

References

{{Reflist Fiber-optic communications