Forum to sponsor GMPLS 'first'

On the heels of what the MPLS Forum claims was the largest multi-vendor MPLS demo yet at Supercomm in June, the group next week plans to stage another first: a public multi-vendor Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) interoperability demonstration.

GMPLS is a set of network protocols that provides a control plane for devices that switch in packet, wavelength, time-division multiplexing and fiber networks.

Next week's GMPLS event at the Next Generation Networks conference in Boston will be a "proof of concept" demo involving seven companies. They will attempt to demonstrate the ease and speed of bandwidth and service provisioning facilitated by GMPLS among their respective products.

The GMPLS demonstration will test vendor interoperability using the GMPLS RSVP-TE protocol by sending traffic across an independent OC-48 data plane.

Participating products include: Agilent Technologies Inc. Router Tester 900; Cisco Systems Inc. 12404 Internet Router; Data Connection (DCL) DC-MPLS, DC-OSPF and DC-LMP software; Juniper Networks Inc. M-10 Router; NetPlane Systems Inc. LTC-Optical; Nettest Inc. GMPLS interEMULATOR and Sycamore Networks Inc. SN 16000 Intelligent Optical Switch.

MPLS Forum officials say GMPLS is still two years away from a larger, "ready to generate revenue" demonstration like the MPLS demo at Supercomm last June was. That demo had 21 vendor participants.