The Role of ASON and GMPLS for the Bandwidth Trading Market - Bandwidth Brokerage Under the Influence of Novel Control Plane Technologies

Bandwidth services as they have evolved over the last years can increasingly be seen as a commodity. Multiple network operators have comparable offerings and compete for customers. This fuelled the foundation of bandwidth brokerage and bandwidth trading companies in the late 90s. Unfortunately, their business models where not very successful in the past. Besides the overall economic weakness at the moment we identify some generic and technical reasons for this. Moreover we show that with novel automation technologies like GMPLS or ASON/ASTN some of these problems can be alleviated. Possible operational models show how future bandwidth brokers or traders could be organized.