The OBS control plane: GMPLS integration or not?

Optical Burst Switching and Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching have been around for more than a decade now. The topic of their integration received a fair amount of research interest. This article reviews the main proposed architectures so far and outlines their advantages and drawbacks. The applicability analysis carried out here focuses on the actual feasibility of the integration and the potential trade-offs which appear when two contradicting principles are combined. Taking advantage of the flexibility of the GMPLS control plane does not seem to be as easy and as straightforward as expected. Thus, more than ten years later not many practical implementations of OBS networks with intelligent control can be found. The lack of active work in the ¯eld results in an incomplete set of proposals which address only few aspects of the integration challenge. Here, we analyze what is missing and why the existing solutions seem not to be able to provide the highly desirable strict QoS guarantees for the clients of the OBS networks.