The last two years have seen significant developments in the standardization of GMPLS and its implementation in optical and other networks. GMPLS: Architecture and Applications brings you completely up to date, providing the practical information you need to put the growing set of GMPLS-supported services to work and manage them effectively. This book begins by defining GMPLS's place in a transport network, leveraging your knowledge of MPLS to give you an understanding of this radically new control plane technology. An overview of GMPLS protocols follows, but the real focus is on what comes afterwards: in-depth examinations of the architectures underpinning GMPLS in real-world network environments and current and emerging GMPLS applications. This one-of-a-kind resource delivers immensely useful information for software architects, designers and programmers, hardware developers, system testers, and network operators--and also for managers and other decision-makers.