Architectural approaches for the integration of the service plane and control plane in optical networks

This paper presents some instantiations of novel application-aware network architectures for emerging IT services and future Internet applications. It proposes and analyses network architectures where the Control and Service Planes are closely and seamlessly interacting with the applications. One instantiation, the Grid-GMPLS (G2MPLS, as defined by the Phosphorus project) is presented, which implements the Network Control Plane (NCP) architecture for the support of Grid Network Services (GNS). The GNS allows the provisioning of network and HPC/Grid resources in a single-step through a set of seamlessly integrated procedures. In a second example of instantiation, a quite popular application in signalling, i.e. the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), is integrated with the Optical Burst Switched (OBS) network technology. The SIP-enabled OBS network can be used to manage application sessions and provide network and IT services according to application requirements. This paper investigates the requirements that these new integrated architectures impose on supporting network Control and Service Planes, and technologies, and discusses their possible implementations.