An efficient and scalable metro-ethernet architecture

Ethernet has gained popularity for deploying in Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) due to its ease of management and highly cost effective. While the flat addressing scheme (i.e., nonhierarchical MAC addresses) and the broadcast based address resolution scheme simplify many aspects of configuration, they also bring poor scalability. This paper aims at developing an efficient and scalable Metro-Ethernet architecture. To achieve this goal, we propose a Distributed Registration based Address Resolution Protocol (DRARP) and an End user enabled Mac-in-Mac (EMiM) encapsulation scheme. DRARP solves an unknown address through unicast, and hence eliminates the broadcast messages. EMiM does Mac-in-Mac (MiM) encapsulation by end users instead of the Provider Edge (PE) nodes, thus significantly reducing the PE node’s forwarding table size. The proposed architecture sustains the Ethernet’s plug-and-play feature and provides high scalability. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes can save more than 60% communication messages for address resolution and up to 80% forwarding table size in PE nodes.Department of Computin