Ethernet-over-SONET(EoS) over WDM in Optical Wide-Area Networks (WANs): Benefits and Challenges

Abstract

Ethernet has been playing an increasingly important role in wide area networks (WANs), from both a service perspective and a transport-technology perspective. Unlike its dominant presence in local area networks (LANs), Ethernet in WANs has been increasing its popularity in three different directions, i.e., Ethernet-based layer-2 virtual private network (L2VPN) over layer-3 network, Ethernet over SONET (EoS), and Ethernet directly over WDM channels or optical fibers. In this paper, we investigate the benefits and challenges of using next-generation SONET/SDH techniques—namely SONET/SDH virtual concatenation (VCAT) and link-capacity adjustment scheme (LCAS)—to support Ethernet-based data services in intelligent optical WDM wide area networks. In particular, we evaluate the network performance improvement after employing VCAT. In order to fully utilize VCAT’s inverse-multiplexing capability, several simple and effective heuristic algorithms are proposed and evaluated.