Optical network design for a multiline-rate carrier-grade Ethernet under transmission-range constraints

Abstract—Ethernet is a success story in local area networks (LAN). Efforts for extending its boundaries beyond LAN to the carriers ’ backbone networks are in progress. We study the problem of designing reliable and cost-efficient high-rate (100 Gbit/s) carrier-grade Ethernet in a multiline-rate optical network under signal transmission-range constraints. Reliability is achieved using shared-path protection at the connection level (Ethernet tunnel in this study). We construct an auxiliary graph, called mixed topology (MT), using which it is possible to: 1) iden-tify traffic grooming possibilities; 2) select a path which requires the minimum amount of 3R regeneration; and 3) effectively choose the data rate of the channel to be established. Our algorithms, tested on the 17-node German network, resulted in lower network cost and higher resource utilization compared with other schemes. Index Terms—3R regeneration, carrier grade, Ethernet, Ether-path, link stretching, mixed topology (MT), multiline rate, signa