On Providing Metro Ethernet Services over Transparent WDM Optical Rings

The long list of benefits (especially cost and capacity) of Ethernet LANs has made the IEEE, the ITU-T, and the Metro Ethernet Forum define the requirements for taking Ethernet beyond the local area, toward the metropolitan region. In addition, the ever-increasing traffic demands of new applications and users can only be met by the huge bandwidth capacity provided by optical fibers. This work studies how to provide metro Ethernet services over transparent tunable-transmitter fixed-receiver WDM optical ring networks. A new adaptation layer of ME to WDM is proposed, and its benefits and drawbacks are studied. It is shown that such a transparent WDM ring network can be seen as a logical full-mesh topology by the upper ME layer, thus reducing to one the number of optical-electronic-optical conversions per unicast frame. Additionally, two different approaches are proposed in the case of broadcast/multicast traffic, since this may bring scalability difficulties in ring topologies.The work described in this article was carried out with the support of the Building the Future Optical Network in Europe (BONE) project, a Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission through the 7th ICT-Framework Programme. Additionally, the authors are thankful for the support of the T2C2 (grant TIN2008-06739C04-01) and MEDIANET (grant S2009/TIC-1468) projects for the development of this work.European Community's Seventh Framework ProgramPublicad