Inter-Domain Path Provisioning With Security Features: Architecture and Signaling Performance

Significant research and standardization efforts are underway to enable an automated computation and setup of connection-oriented paths across multiple domains. Despite the technological advances in transport network technologies, such as Ethernet PBB-TE, MPLS-TP, WDM, security features related to connection origination, monitoring and accounting remain an open challenge. In absence of secure authentication and authorization, carriers will continue to provision connections manually, which may lead configuration errors and large setup delays. Carriers also lack mechanisms to meter connection quality during the service lifetime and typically do not exchange accounting information for established connections for auditing and billing purposes.