Carrier-Grade Ethernet Technologies for Next Generation Wide Area Ethernet

This paper describes an overview of overall carrier-grade Ethernet technologies for next generation wide area Ethernet. In recent years, from access network to metro and core network, we can find many areas where communication services are provided by Ethernet technologies. This comes from the fact that operational efficiency and economical efficiency of Ethernet are far better than that of conventional wide area communication technologies such as SONET and ATM. On the other hand, carriergrade reliability, operations-administration-maintenance (OAM) and quality of service (QoS) are inferior to SONET and ATM. Various standard schemes in IEEE 802 and ITU-T and vendors’ proprietary schemes can leave various approaches to solve these problems. In this paper, the author explains a basic architecture of wide area Ethernet service (Q-in-Q tagging for metro network and Mac-in-Mac encapsulation for core network) at first. Various switch control technologies are then discussed which are deployed or are under evaluation in order to improve (i) reliability (i.e., resiliency) to protect subscribers against network failures, (ii) OAM for providers to perform fault and performance management, and (iii) QoS to guarantee subscriber’s service level agreement between a carrier and a subscriber. Finally, a new switching architecture, Global Open Ethernet (GOE), is also introduced as one of promising approaches to realize a next generation carrier-grade Ethernet. key words: MAN, Ethernet, reliability, QoS, OAM