Study of optical control plane for translucent WDM networks

In this article, we concentrate on the study of control plane and management approaches for translucent WDM networks. A hybrid optical control plane (OCP) is proposed, which needs the extensions of both routing and signaling protocol, to combine the best features of routing-based information updating and signaling-based data collection and path evaluation. Simulations are conducted to compare hybrid OCP with two existing control architectures: signaling-based OCP and routing-based OCP. Numerical results show that hybrid OCP exhibits a lower blocking probability than the other approaches, and also minimizes the stability and scalability problems under various traffic conditions.