Infinera Corp Infinera Corp ZTE Huawei Huawei Huawei This document specifies the GMPLS control plane requirements, framework, and architecture for the FlexE technology. The document also discusses interoperation between the GMPLS control plane for FlexE and the control plane of any networking layer using the FlexE technology as a server layer. As different from earlier Ethernet data planes FlexE allows for decoupling of the Ethernet Physical layer (PHY) and Media Access Control layer (MAC) rates. Study Group 15 (SG15) of the ITU-T has endorsed the FlexE Implementation Agreement from Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) and included it, by reference, in some of their Recommendations.