tures becomes inefficient: cen- tral management for the physical transport (SDH/SONET and optical transport network [OTN]) and automatic control plane for the packet layer (IP and Ethernet) have to merge. As a matter of fact, with the network technology evolution and the introduction of a great number of new services, static centralized management is demonstrated to be not suitable for the carriers needs. It is true that TMN-based management had the merit of introducing a never before seen ability of controlling the network and of assuring performances and reliability, but with a traffic more and more dynamic, the great number of manual operations required by cen- tralized network managers are a source of both costs and errors. On the other hand, the packet layer is managed through an automatic control plane that, even if is sometimes poor in terms of reporting with respect to the carriers expectations, is very effective in decreasing costs and eliminating errors. Thus, it is quite natural to envision a new control plane that is capable of automatically managing all the network layers in an integrated manner and is also sufficiently rich in functionalities SO as to be at least comparable with traditional TMN. Different initiatives are ongoing to create new control plane standards. In particular, ITU-T, the world standardization institute that is traditionally carrier-driven, has devel- oped the automatic switched optical network (ASON) standard with the aim of providing a framework for the development of the convergent network control plane [1]. Also IETF, that is the facto the Internet standardization body and is traditionally vendor- driven, has created the generalized-multiprotocol label switch (GMPLS) protocol suite, a complete control plane whose standardization is in some parts still ongoing, whose target is to generalize the ideas at the base of MPLS [32, 33, 34] to be able to manage not only packet-oriented networks, but also circuit-oriented networks like the WDM layer or the next generation SONET layer.