Testbed implementation of control plane extensions for inter-carrier GMPLS LSP provisioning

This paper presents a testbed implementation of an inter-carrier GMPLS (generalized multi protocol label switching) service architecture recently proposed. This architecture couples the path computation element (PCE)-based control plane with a service plane managing discovery, composition and activation functions of inter-carrier service elements. The testbed implements the required PCE communication protocol (PCEP) and resource reservation protocol with traffic engineering (RSVP-TE) extensions, together with service request filtering operations performed with a policy based architecture.