Projecte realitzat mitjançant programa de mobilitat. VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRUSSEL i POLITECNICO DI TORINO, III Facoltà di Ingegneria Informatica.

Transport networks have moved towards a model called Automatically Switched Optical Network (ASON) controlled by the Generalized Multi-protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) control plane. An ASON/GMPLS network is an intelligent optical network providing the Internet Protocol (IP)/Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) layer with dynamic and dis-tributed connection provisioning. In the IP/MPLS layer the service differentiation has become necessary to cope with the aggregation of various services, including performance-sensitive as well as best effort applications. The Differentiated Services (DiffServ) technology has become quite mature in IP/MPLS domains and the research world has recently made an effort to extend it within the ASON/GMPLS layer. In the DiffServ is executed in a multilayer fashion by means of a technique called virtual topology differentiation. This technique allows different Classes of Service (CoS) to be accommodated over independent virtual topologies and with different multilayer routing policies. The authors demonstrate how different CoS are provided with different levels of QoS. However, the extension of the GMPLS control plane for the introduction of the DiffServ in IP/MPLS over ASON/GMPLS networks is not addressed. This thesis addresses the problem of multilayer service differentiation in IP/MPLS over ASON/GMPLS network focusing on the GMPLS control plane. We start from the Multi-Topology (MT) routing technique used in the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol to address the MT problem in IP networks. We first make the suitable adaptation to employ this technique in the GMPS control plane as well. The extended MT technique is then implemented in an IP/MPLS over ASON/GMPLS simulator. We finally use the extended simulator to simulate three strategies introduced in [14] in order to make an analysis of the multilayer service differentiation.