Three recovery mechanisms are implemented with the end-to-end signaling capabilities The results presenting the network equipment interface requirements and recovery time performance confirm the advantages of cross-layer coordination of the IP/MPLS data client networks served by a GMPLS transport network 1 This work was supported by the European Commission and carried out in collaboration between partners of IST project NOBEL phase 1.

Network operators have been facing big changes since IP traffic began overwhelming other kinds of data transport. On the other hand, access networks are continuously improving and it is anticipated that bandwidth demands will exponentially increase within next decade to cope with triple-play service requirements. The first level of aggregation, namely metro access networks, can become the bottleneck if no serious modifications are carried out because they were initially designed for circuitoriented services such as analogical voice transmission and they can not keep up with bandwidth demands at reasonable Capital Expenditure efforts. In this paper, the authors present a migration roadmap for metro access networks derived from the results of NOBEL, ePhoton/One and FIRM* European research projects. To achieve it, Dual Bus Optical Ring Network (DBORN), Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) and Optical Circuit Switched Rings (OCSR) architectures have been analyzed both from the technological and the economic point of view in the short and medium term.

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