Friday, January 25, 2008

What is it, a fully managed PBB-TE or with a control plane ?

Debate is going on over the Traffic Engineered PBB to have a management plane which is pre-configured and to have a resiliency time well below 50ms. Another option which is being thought of is having a control plane much like the GMPLS, with a drawback of having resiliency time constraints. The GMPLS control plane is also evolving to give space to PBT under a common efforts to have greater flexibility in the control plane with draft-fedyk-gmpls-ethernet-pbb-te-01.txt and later versions. This calls for a strong OAM&P support. MSTP is expected to be used within the PBB Edge devices with less number of nodes so as to reduce the convergence time, still the handshake is slower than 50ms. It is claimed that PBB-TE with control plane would ensure that the time constraints are met, however this is still a question.