New Technologies and Directions for the Optical Control Plane

Distributed control plane technology has been incorporated in many carrier optical networks to improve automation, robustness, and efficiency. Going forward, carriers' interest is shifting from internal domain protocols to interdomain interfaces. Also, new transport technologies being deployed such as optical transport network, packet, and photonic transport need control plane support, while new technologies are being added to the control plane itself, especially path computation elements and multilayer integration tools.