GMPLS

Telcos need to support the tremendous rise in Global IP traffic and most important keep margins on the per bit transported into their network. They need to multiply the bandwidth, while building differentiating services and keeping high quality of experience for the end-user. This requires to innovate in their transport network where engineering and switching are much more efficient for large bandwidth flows.

Equipment manufacturers developed new approaches, including traffic engineering, reliable resource inventory and fast, scheduled and on-demand optical path provisioning. These approaches have created an international standard: GMPLS (Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching) control plane. Standardized by ITU-T ( G.8080 ASTN), IETF (CCAMP and PCE working groups) and promoted by a consortium of telcos at the OIF (Optical Interoperability Forum), the GMPLS control plane is dedicated to enable an intelligent service driven transport network through protocols building blocks.

MARBEN GMPLS

MARBEN GMPLS provides the ultimate off-the-shelf GMPLS solution, which covers the legacy SONET/SDH control plane to new Packet Optical Transport Systems (P-OTS), the Optical Transport Networks (OTN) switching platforms and multi degree Reverse Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) nodes.

Marben developed its MARBEN GMPLS software suite with major optical equipment manufacturers in order to reduce their time to market and focus their development on differentiating services.

overview
MARBEN GMPLS ( Blue components)

Marben has designed a modular C-source software based on standalone components with public API and a set of coherent documents.

Protocols

The components above inside the horseshoe are protocols oriented components in charge of the management of adjacent session's maintenance, coding/decoding messages and basic mechanism such as Graceful restart mechanism or Finite state machine depending on the protocols. MARBEN GMPLS suite is based on six distinct protocols components RSVP-TE, OSPF-TE, ISIS-TE, LMP, PCE and LLDP.

Development Kits

Marben provides libraries positioned on top of the MARBEN protocols components that handle a low level development API to control the different protocols. These development kits (Signaling development kit, Traffic Engineering development kit, PCE development kit and LMP development kit) integrate an in-memory database with performant access in read/write mode for large amount of data in charge to store states and all the information learnt from the network. The traffic engineering hides also differences between the two Interior Gateway Protocols (IGP) protocols for advertising opaque LSA (Link State Advertisements).

Controllers

Marben provides pre-integrated application built with three standalone components respectively signaling controller, routing controller and link resource manager as per G.8080 ASTN standard defines.

The controllers handle multiple control plane applications as commercial off-the-shelf:

  • a true GMPLS peer model configuration,
  • an ENN-I Interface as defined in OIF E-NNI signaling and routing 2.0,
  • a UNI-C and UNI-N interface as defined in OIF UNI 2.0 IA,
  • a PCE server configuration.

Those controllers can handle different transport technologies such as lambda, ODUs, VCs or Packet switching layers e.g. MPLS-TP, PBB-TE or Ethernet as configuration parameters when building the application.