Telecommunications Essentials

IP over Optical Standards

An important part of the optical networking discussion is standards regarding IP over optical. Three standards efforts are working on optical management specifications, addressing the linking of IP services directly to the optical networks that carry data, allowing these networks to take advantage of the routing intelligence now embedded in IP headers:

• MPλS— The IETF's Multiprotocol Lambda Switching (MPλS) initiative, supported by Uunet and Cisco Systems, describes an approach to the design of control planes that take advantage of the existing techniques developed for MPLS traffic engineering. The goal is to provide a framework for real-time provisioning of optical channels in automatically switched optical networks, ...