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Abstract
Plug and play optical (PPO) nodes can be used to ease the deployment of optical networks. Once plugged, PPO nodes provide all-optical circuits between client nodes to alleviate the electronic processing bottleneck of high speed networks. PPO nodes must self-adjust to changes of the optical physical topology and fiber propagation characteristics, and provide wavelength routing functionalities to client nodes.
This thesis presents a protocol, the TI-LSA protocol, for physical topology discovery at the PPO node layer, e.g., it may be used to advertise available optical resources and changing conditions of the optical physical layer. The protocol is based on the link state advertisement (LSA) principle and modified to take advantage of the transparency island (TI) properties in the optical data plane. As discussed in the thesis, the proposed TI-LSA protocol is a scalable solution to the problem of topology discovery and update in PPO networks when the optical transparency island size is relatively small.
The scalability of routing and resource advertisement protocols is a key issue in not only PPO node network but also in other large optical networks. This thesis presents a protocol CR protocol for routing in PPO node network. A commonly used solution is based on the hierarchical approach adopted in IP/MPLS networks, i.e., multiple areas or autonomous systems are pre-established to contain the geographical scope of the resource advertisement protocols and the related routing information. With arbitrarily pre-established areas, routing decision might be sub-optimal. Thus, special care must be paid by the network designer to subdivide effectively the network into areas. This thesis presents and discusses an alternative routing technique that can be adopted to improve both optimality and scalability of routing and resource advertisement protocols without requiring the use of manually pre-established areas.
