AT&T This draft describes requirements for multi-area TE within the context of GMPLS. Based on the requirements, the goal is to eventually provide protocol extensions needed for multi-area TE. Various approaches to multi-area TE are considered, and these approaches are evaluated against the requirements. These approaches include state dependent routing (SDR) LSP selection, event dependent routing (EDR) LSP selection, and time dependent routing (TDR) LSP selection. These approaches include needs to support path-computation server (PCS) functionality, query functionality, crankback functionality, TE feedback functionality, and summary-LSA functionality. The target in future releases of this document will be to converge on a reduced subset of the required multi-area TE methods and protocol extensions.