An Overview of the State of the Art and Future Trends in GMPLS Controlled Optical Transport Networks

In this article we present a short survey of representative milestones achieved during last years on the control and managementof optical transport networks, and discuss their main characteristics and potential impact on the future.It is worth noting that this survey does not try to enumerate all the existing research topics and patents. Instead, it focuses on a representative subset and tries to relate them to a few important ongoing research topics. Concerning patents, some inventions from important companies such as Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., Futurewei Technologies, Inc., Hitachi Ltd., Huawei Technologies Co., or Tellabs Operations Inc. are reviewed. As deployment of these advanced networks seems to be imminent, all of these companies show a great interest in being well positioned. Finally, selected still open research issues are also introduced and expected near term contributions are devised.