This paper describes the UNI interoperability problems of control plane. Resulting from the two kinds of models for control plane, ITU-T ASON/OIF UNI and IETF GMPLS cannot interwork directly because of the slight differences in the usage of RS VP objects. Moreover, many transport equipment vendors prefer ASON control plane with OIF UNI, but large router vendors choose to implement GMPLS on their equipments. Facing this dilemma, we propose an innovative scheme, UNI converter, to solve the interoperability problem. The UNI converter is deployed between the GMPLS routers and OIF UNI transport network equipments. It can properly modify an OIF UNI signaling control packet to GMPLS-compliant and vice versa. Our simulation result shown that an end-to-end connection was successful established across the GMPLS and ASON control plane with the help of the UNI converters.
ASON (Automatically Switched Optical Network) GMPLS (Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching) OIF UNI (Optical Internetworking Forum User-to-Network Interface) RSVP-TE (Resource Reservation Protocol - Traffic Engineering)