INTRODUCTION

Realizing the need of totally new way of controlling carrier networks, GMPLS technology was developed. It helps service providers make more money from their existing infrastructures and reduce costs as well. The emergence of optical transport systems has dramatically increased the raw capacity of optical networks and has enabled a slew of new, sophisticated applications. An important economic impact of GMPLS is providing the ability to automate network resource management and the service provisioning of end-to-end traffic-engineered paths. GMPLS aims to do more than SS7, in that it promises to automate the layers beneath Internet Protocol (IP), including the optical layer, which is now manually (and painstakingly) configured in today's telecom networks.