Design and Implementation of a Stateful PCE-Based Unified Control and Management Framework for Carrier-Grade MPLS-TP Networks

Abstract

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a generalized topology discovery, operational monitoring, and provisioning (G-TOP) controller for a carrier-grade transport network. The G-TOP controller is a vendor-specific extension of the stateful PCE that integrates network topology discovery, path computation, and provisioning functions, but decouples the switch specific management framework. The G-TOP protocol enables the G-TOP controller to collect topology information, set up LSPs, and monitor state both from and to the management framework in a unified way. To validate the feasibility of the proposed framework, the author implemented a testbed using a multi-protocol label switching transport profile (MPLS-TP) switches and performed experimental testing. The experimental results show that the centralized control framework reduces provisioning time by approximately 68 ms and the autonomous management framework reduces fault recovery time by approximately 27 ms, while reducing the traffic load on the controller by several orders of magnitude compared to the OpenFlow approach.