Automatically switched optical network

The Control Plane is responsible for the actual resource and connection management within an ASON network.

The traffic from user connected to an ASON network contains data for both Transport and Control Plane.

The IETF, on the other hand, has been tasked with the development of new protocols in response to general industry requirement.

Therefore, while ITU already include the PNNI protocol for signaling in the Control plane, IETF has been developing GMPLS (Generalized MPLS) as a second option protocol to be used in the Control Plane for signalling.

[5] As a product of IETF, GMPLS uses IP to communicate between different components in the Control Plane.