Cisco Unified Control Plane (UCP):

The Cisco Unified Control Plane (UCP), an optical control plane, is an integral part of the Cisco COMET strategy for accelerating profitable service delivery—allowing service providers to turn up new high-bandwidth, high-margin services more simply and quickly. By distributing a key function of the provisioning process to the Optical Transport Network (OTN), UCP enhances and scales the functions provided by traditional network management systems, significantly lowering operations costs and creating a foundation for easily adding new value-added services in the future.

Cisco UCP supports a standards-based implementation of the UNI specification.

Cisco Systems is using UCP technology to solve real-world problems today. The multiphase UCP strategy will enable solutions that use IP intelligence to simplify and accelerate the provisioning of connections within an OTN, between OTNs and IP networks, across multiple OTNs, and finally, end-to-end or universally, regardless of network or service type. Whether it’s the company’s use of IP intelligence for provisioning within next-generation optical transport systems or its industry-first demonstration of User Network Interface (UNI) -based provisioning of optical circuits between IP networks (OFC 2001), Cisco delivers this phased and evolutionary strategy through standards development, technology innovation, and product leadership, resulting in real-world solutions that can be deployed in real-world networks today (UNI), while preparing for future Generalized Multi Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) peer models tomorrow.

UCP Resources

	The Cisco Unified Control Plane - June 6, 2001 (.pdf 162KB) This white paper presents an overview of the Unified Control Plane - a standards-based direction towards an open architecture for the control and provisioning of optical transport elements and capacity.
	Cisco Systems Participates in OIF Interoperability Demo at SUPERCOMM - June 1, 2001