SIP-Empowered Optical Networks for Future IT Services and Applications

This article presents a novel application- aware network architecture for evolving and emerging IT services and applications. It propos- es to enrich an optical burst switching network with a session control layer that can close the gap between application requests and network control. The session control layer is implement- ed using the Session Initiation Protocol, giving birth to what is called a SIP-OBS architecture. The article discusses the important added value of this architecture, and shows that it may sup- port a number of end-to-end resource discovery and reservation strategies (for both network and non-network resources). Finally, it presents a testbed implementation where this approach was experimentally validated.