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Do you remember the TV ads several years ago for a famous kitchen knife? It was not an ordinary knife—no, sir. This knife could slice, dice, and julienne. It could saw through a tin can and afterward still cut a tomato into paper-thin slices.
Like that famous knife, GMPLS is not ordinary MPLS. GMPLS discovers its neighbors, distributes link information, provides topology management, and provides path management, link protection, and recovery. But that’s not all! GMPLS packets fly through the network at nearly the speed of light.
In performing these functions, GMPLS can help us achieve the pinnacle of networking (see Figure 6.1). GMPLS allows for centralized control, automatic provisioning, load balancing, provisioned bandwidth service, bandwidth on demand, and the presence of an optical virtual private network (OVPN).
Figure 6.1: GMPLS Advantages
Let’s look at what led up to the creation of this super MPLS protocol: GMPLS.
In the beginning, there was one network—the telecom network. Much later, datacom and the Internet came along. The telecommunications world was divided into two different and distant parts: the datacom world and the telecom world. Datacom was primarily concerned with nonreal-time performance; the telecom/voice communications network was concerned with real-time performance.
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