Generic Ethernet Research Articles

Redesigned TDM-PON System Architecture Based on Point-to-Point Ethernet Transmission and Software Processing With General-Purpose Hardware

This article proposes a novel architecture of a time division multiplexing passive optical network (TDM-PON) system with general-purpose hardware. The system operates with the point-to-point (P2P) Ethernet protocol and software processing. The architecture is redesigned from the ground up, differing from conventional PON system architectures. In recent years, researchers have attempted to softwarize a number of PON functions such as media access control (MAC) and physical functions, which run on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). On the other hand, these existing systems still required PON-dedicated or programmable hardware for processing the PON specific protocol. This paper proposes a TDM-PON system that requires only general-purpose hardware; a network interface card with the use of the P2P Ethernet protocol and a general-purpose server with the use of software processing. To operate the proposed system, we newly developed burst-mode operation and multipoint MAC control schemes, while taking Link Fault Signaling and CPU processing jitter into account. We quantitatively evaluated the burst-mode transmission with P2P generic Ethernet TRx as a preliminary experiment, which showed that T <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">on</sub> and T <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">off</sub> were 75 μs and less than 1 μs, respectively. Then, we measured our developed prototype system's performance for verifying the feasibility of our proposal. In specific, it achieved a 5.2 Gbps PON system consisting of an optical line terminal (OLT) server and two optical network unit (ONU) servers under the condition of a 500-ms grant cycle including a 100-ms discovery window.

Xen2MX: High-performance communication in virtualized environments

Cloud computing infrastructures provide vast processing power and host a diverse set of computing workloads, ranging from service-oriented deployments to high-performance computing (HPC) applications. As HPC applications scale to a large number of VMs, providing near-native network I/O performance to each peer VM is an important challenge. In this paper we present Xen2MX, a paravirtual interconnection framework over generic Ethernet, binary compatible with Myrinet/MX and wire compatible with MXoE. Xen2MX combines the zero-copy characteristics of Open-MX with Xen's memory sharing techniques. Experimental evaluation of our prototype implementation shows that Xen2MX is able to achieve nearly the same raw performance as Open-MX running in a non-virtualized environment. On the latency front, Xen2MX performs as close as 96% to the case where virtualization layers are not present. Regarding throughput, Xen2MX saturates a 10Gbps link, achieving 1159MB/s, compared to 1192MB/s of the non-virtualized case. Scales efficiently with the number of VMs, saturating the link for even smaller messages when 40 single-core VMs put pressure on the network adapters.

High-performance message-passing over generic Ethernet hardware with Open-MX

In the last decade, cluster computing has become the most popular high-performance computing architecture. Although numerous technological innovations have been proposed to improve the interconnection of nodes, many clusters still rely on commodity Ethernet hardware to implement message-passing within parallel applications. We present O pen-MX, an open-source message-passing stack over generic Ethernet. It offers the same abilities as the specialized Myrinet Express stack, without requiring dedicated support from the networking hardware. O pen-MX works transparently in the most popular MPI implementations through its MX interface compatibility. It also enables interoperability between hosts running the specialized MX stack and generic Ethernet hosts. We detail how O pen-MX copes with the inherent limitations of the Ethernet hardware to satisfy the requirements of message-passing by applying an innovative copy offload model. Combined with a careful tuning of the fabric and of the MX wire protocol, O pen-MX achieves better performance than TCP implementations, especially on 10 gigabit/s hardware.

Ethernet Ring Protection Using Filtering Database Flip Scheme For Minimum Capacity Requirement

Ethernet ring protection is a new technology introduced in ITU-T Recommendation G.8032, which utilizes the generic Ethernet MAC functions. We introduce an alternative enhanced protection switching scheme to suppress penalty in the switching transient, in which the Ethernet MAC filtering database (FDB) is actively and directly modified by information disseminated from the nodes adjacent to failure. The modified FDB at all nodes are guaranteed to be consistent to form a complete new ring network topology immediately. This scheme can reduce the capacity requirement of the G.8032 by several times. This proposed scheme can be also applied in IP protection rings.