Link Management Protocol (LMP) is designed to ease the configuration and management of optical network devices. Such devices may be interconnected by thousands of data-bearing links, which are aggregated into a smaller number of traffic engineering (TE) links. LMP provides automatic configuration of such devices, negotiation of capabilities, and localization of faults.
DC-LMP provides a complete, scalable, and fault-tolerant source code implementation of LMP.
The DC-LMP Features section below lists the most important functions provided by the DC-LMP product. For more information about the architecture and interfaces of the DC-LMP product, see the DC-LMP Architecture page. For a more detailed discussion of the LMP protocol, see the LMP Protocol page.
DC-LMP is designed for use in highly scaled devices, potentially requiring distribution and redundancy of software, and complements DC-MPLS to provide a complete control plane for optical devices such as
- optical network nodes
- photonic switches
- optical cross-connects
- WDM equipment
- Packet-optical transport platforms
- optical network edge nodes
- OIF UNI network nodes (UNI-N)
- OIF UNI client nodes (UNI-C)
DC-LMP supports both networks where the control channels are in-band and networks where the control channels are out-of-band.
DC-LMP Features
The following lists the features supported in the DC-LMP protocol product.
- All mandatory and optional elements of the LMP protocol
- Control channel establishment
- Capability configuration
- Control channel maintenance
- Link property correlation
- Link verification
- Fault localization
- OIF UNI neighbor discovery
- OIF UNI service discovery
- Support for IETF and OIF function
- LMP (RFC 4204)
- OIF User Network Interface (UNI) 1.0 Signaling Specification (oif2000.125)
- SONET / SDH link verification extensions (RFC 4207)
- Support for minimal system configuration
- Optional auto-discovery of neighbors
- Optional auto-discovery of TE link peers
- MIBs for management integration with SNMP, CORBA or CMIP
- Full support for the LMP MIB (draft-ietf-ccamp-lmp-mib)
- The ifStackTable from the interfaces MIB (RFC 2863) or, if this is implemented elsewhere, notification to DC-LMP of the bundling of data links into TE links
- The UNI service discovery MIB, which we are working with the OIF to define
- The DC-LMP product MIB for configuring DC-LMP
- Integrated with DC-MPLS to provide a full control plane for optical devices
- Can be used with third-party MPLS or OSPF implementations
- Significant availability and fault tolerance advancements in management of configuration information possible with Configuration Safe Store
- Checkpointing & Rollback
- Failover Restoration
- Graceful Restart
- Hot Software Upgrade & Downgrade
- Error Handling