Subject: Re: Optical IP activities

From: "J. Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 01:18:58 -0500

> From: Debanjan <[email-masked]>

    > The real issue here is whether you want all the routers to know about
    > these "optical constraints" (distortion/chirp, wavelength conversion
    > capability). The other option would be to keep these two domains
    > separate and use an abstraction where the routers view the optical
    > network as a cloud (overlay model).

Hmmm. A very interesting point; attributes for topology elements which are
rather arcane, but understanding of which is vital for generating useful
paths.

After pondering for a bit, my take is that in the long run you'd still want
to use a single routing system (for routing at the optical layer, and at the
internetwork layer); the reason being that that will make it easier to export
data which *is* useful to other entities about that part of the network.
However, you'd probably want to hide some of the actual detail, and only
advertise (to entities on the outside) longer "virtual" links, ones which are
actually paths across the optical fabric, paths which have been
preconstructed to meet the special optical constraints.

Yes, I know we don't have a routing system that can do anything like that
today. :-( Some day...

	Noel

---

From: Quaizar Vohra <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 01:47:05 -0800 (PST)

Perhaps, the notion of forwarding adjacency in
draft-kompella-mpls-optical-00.txt might be something similar ?