A Unified Network Control and Management System for an Integrated EPON and Metro Optical Network Testbed

In this paper, a unified network control and management system for an integrated Ethernet-based optical network testbed is introduced. The integrated optical network testbed consists of an Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) access network and an metro Ethernet network. A unique feature of the developed network control and management system is that all network control and management signaling frames are transmitted and processed in Ethernet layer. As such, the system has a unified architecture for both the metro Ethernet network and the EPON access networks, and provide a uniform interface for network administrators to manage both networks. The architecture and the major functionalities including virtual local area network (VLAN)-based traffic engineering and resource reservation are discussed.