IP-oriented control of unidirectional-path-switched-ring-based transport networks

An important requirement in the IP-based control of time-division multiplexing (TDM) optical transport networks is to utilize the in-built protection capabilities of synchronous optical network (SONET) unidirectional path-switched rings (UPSRs) and to automate the UPSR-protected path setup in mixed mesh–ring networks. This requires modifications to existing IP signaling and routing protocols and new processing rules at the network nodes. Here we leverage IP routing and signaling and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) fast-reroute techniques for accurately advertising UPSR ring topologies to remote nodes and dynamically establishing UPSR-protected paths across a transport network. Our proposal also makes a NUT1-like (nonpreemptible unprotected traffic) feature possible in UPSRs, which allows for efficient utilization of UPSR protection bandwidth. We achieve this by encoding UPSR-specific information in the open shortest-path-first (OSPF) link state advertisements and in signaling messages of the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) with TE extensions. In addition, we modify the signaling and routing state machines at the nodes to interpret and process this information to perform UPSR topology discovery and path computation. The uniqueness of our proposals is that the algorithms and the rules specified here allow for existing IP-based protocols [such as those within the generalized MPLS (GMPLS) framework, which currently applies to mesh networks] to be efficiently adapted for this context while still achieving our objective of exploiting UPSR-protection capabilities.