MARBEN GMPLS Controllers

As a long term provider of GMPLS technologies, Marben has been building pre-profiled MPLS, OIF or GMPLS-based applications for its major customers among the largest equipment vendors. Starting from MARBEN protocols and MARBEN Development kits, Marben has built such application as a set of high-level libraries built on top of MARBEN Signaling and TE development kits to reduce the time to market for smaller equipment vendors and to get a competitive and interoperable GMPLS based solution embedded into any Network Element.

overview
MARBEN GMPLS Controllers architecture

It consists of three modules:

  • MARBEN Signaling controller

    mainly manages Setup and teardown of calls and connections. It invokes services from the Routing Controller and the Link Resource manager to achieve such a goal.

  • MARBEN Routing controller

    mainly manages Path computation capabilities using the traffic engineering information running IS-IS or OSPF routing protocols or using remote PCE server.

  • MARBEN Link resource manager

    performs local TE-Links management.

These controllers provide

  • GMPLS with full and preplanned rerouting, 1+1 protection
  • OIF/ITU-T UNI and E-NNI signaling and routing procedures

These controllers are quasi agnostic to the transport technology - WSS, OTN SONET/SDH and connected Ethernet. These are dedicated to be embedded into MSPP, Metro and Core Cross connects controlling such relying transport technologies.

Key differentiators

  • Time-to-Market

    Built with a high level interface that reduces time to market and cost for such advanced control plane features.

  • Interoperability

    Proven and deployed solution that strongly reduces interoperability matter on all elected GMPLS protocols.

  • Portability

    Developed in C language (with ANSI C and K&R support), MARBEN stack is portable on 32 and 64 bits system platform. Off-the-shelf support is provided for:

    • Linux Real time or Embedded (Montavista, WindRiver, ...);
    • Real-time OS (VxWorks, pSOS+, QNX and OSE soon);
    • Unix(s) (HP-UX, all Linux, SCO, SUN Solaris, IBM AIX, ...);
    • Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and 2008.

  • Efficiency and scalability

    Optimized memory management. All data buffers are exchanged without memory copy within the stack.

    Support of thousands of call connections or hundred of thousands LSPs.

  • Testability and troubleshooting

    Integrated testing facilities: all protocol layer interfaces can be exercised through command lines or scenarii.

    Extensive tracing facilities: traces of activity can be activated on each service access point and dump of connections can be requested.

  • Serviceability

    Extensive configuration at load time and run time. Most of the stack and protocol layer parameters can be modified after compilation and while the stack is up and running.

    Administrative interface is provided for the user's management application. A command line interface tool is provided to access all levels of configuration and tracing.