Photonic MPLS internetworking using an optical code label stack
Generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS), which enables dynamic optical path provisioning, is promising. However, the critical issues of GMPLS in the optical domain are the data granularity of a wavelength and the very exiguous label space. The capacity of a single wavelength path may be sometimes too large to accommodate the traffic between edge node pairs, and the label space may be too small to assign the labels to each packet or flow. To solve the granularity and label space issues, optical code MPLS (OC-MPLS) is proposed. In this paper, OC-MPLS internetworking is introduced and experimentally demonstrated. One of the key techniques is photonic label processing of a label stack attached to a single packet or flow. The proposed method performs routing of packets or flows for interconnected OC-MPLS networks depending on the attached label stack in an all optical manner.
optical code generalized multiprotocol label swithing (gmpls) network architecture packet routing photonic network