TABLE OF CONTENTS GMPLS is a very young and rapidly growing technology. Users and providers of transport services, and vendors of transport network equipment and management systems watch all areas of the development of GMPLS very closely. Features, applications, frameworks and architectural solutions, protocol standards, inter- operability events, and scientific and marketing research all contribute to the rapid forward motion of GMPLS. The enthusiasm with which new directions are developed within GMPLS, and the importance placed on these developments by the Service Providers and equipment vendors, arise because of the potential revenues and services that the technology promises to deliver if it is successful.
In this chapter we will discuss an example of such an application GMPLS Point-to-Multipoint (P2MP) Traffic Engineering. It relies very heavily on the concepts, principles, solutions, and techniques described in the previous chapters. At the time of writing, Point-to-Multipoint GMPLS is in the early stages of discussion and standardization.
Chapter 12 describes Layer One Virtual Private Networks, another example of a GMPLS application that is in the early stages of development.
So far, while discussing transport services, we have always assumed that each service had exactly one source and exactly one destination. However, there are applications that require data delivery from a single source to multiple destinations. Examples of such applications are IP Multicast, VPN Multicast, Content Distribution, Interactive Multimedia, and many others. These applications need point-to-multipoint transport services that is, services that can deliver data from a single source to multiple...
