Impact of GMPLS Control Message Loss

GMPLS is typically viewed as an attractive control plane for optical networks. Motivated by a desire to investigate the impact of control plane faults on the data plane, the impact of losing messages from the key GMPLS protocols, OSPF-TE and RSVP-TE, is studied in this paper. A number of configurations of both protocols are compared in a range of scenarios, with the impact of control message loss assessed by evaluating the efficacy of the control plane in establishing and maintaining data plane connections and the overhead incurred in doing so.