Ethernet - a survey on its fields of application

During the last decades, Ethernet progressively became the most widely used local area networking (LAN) technology. Apart from LAN installations, Ethernet became also attractive for many other fields of application, ranging from industry to avionics, telecommunication, and multimedia. The expanded application of this technology is mainly due to its significant assets like reduced cost, backward-compatibility, flexibility, and expandability. However, this new trend raises some problems concerning the services of the protocol and the requirements for each application. Therefore, specific adaptations prove essential to integrate this communication technology in each field of application. Our primary objective is to show how Ethernet has been enhanced to comply with the specific requirements of several application fields, particularly in transport, embedded and multimedia contexts. The paper first describes the common Ethernet LAN technology and highlights its main features. It reviews the most important specific Ethernet versions with respect to each application field’s requirements. Finally, we compare these different fields of application and we particularly focus on the fundamental concepts and the quality of service capabilities of each proposal

Multicast Routing In Optical Access Networks

Widely available broadband services in the Internet require high capacity access networks. Only optical networking is able to efficiently provide the huge bandwidth required by multimedia applications. Distributed applications such as Video-Conferencing, HDTV, VOD and Distance Learning are increasingly common and produce a large amount of data traffic, typically between several terminals. Multicast is a bandwidth-efficient technique for one-to-many or many-to-many communications, and will be indispensable for serving multimedia applications in future optical access networks. These applications require robust and reliable connections as well as the satisfaction of QoS criteria. In this chapter, several access network architectures and related multicast routing methods are analyzed. Overall network performance and dependability are the focus of our analysis

Multimedia Networks: Fundamentals and Future Directions

Multimedia has become an integral part of computing and communications environment, and networks are carrying ever-increasing volume of multimedia information. The main characteristics of multimedia information are high-volume and bursty traffic, with low tolerance to delay and delay variance. The legacy networks (designed in 70s and 80s) are not able to meet these requirements. Enhancements to the older networking technologies have been developed to convert these into multimedia networks. Enhancements to LANs include Switched Ethernet, Isochronous Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, 100VGAnyLAN, FDDI-II, and Synchronous FDDI. WAN options for multimedia networking include digital leased lines and ISDN. The Internet has revolutionized business and personal communications, but falls short of being a genuine multimedia network. To make the Internet capable of carrying multimedia traffic, new protocols such as MBone, ST-II, RTP, and RSVP have been developed. Internet2 is a new initiative that is aimed at overcoming the problems of throughput, delay and jitter encountered on the original Internet. One technology that was developed with multimedia networking as one of its main applications, is the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology. Upcoming Gigabit Ethernet technology will provide a path for upgrading current Ethernet networks into multimedia networks

Performance and policy dimensions in internet routing

The Internet Routing Project, referred to in this report as the 'Highball Project', has been investigating architectures suitable for networks spanning large geographic areas and capable of very high data rates. The Highball network architecture is based on a high speed crossbar switch and an adaptive, distributed, TDMA scheduling algorithm. The scheduling algorithm controls the instantaneous configuration and swell time of the switch, one of which is attached to each node. In order to send a single burst or a multi-burst packet, a reservation request is sent to all nodes. The scheduling algorithm then configures the switches immediately prior to the arrival of each burst, so it can be relayed immediately without requiring local storage. Reservations and housekeeping information are sent using a special broadcast-spanning-tree schedule. Progress to date in the Highball Project includes the design and testing of a suite of scheduling algorithms, construction of software reservation/scheduling simulators, and construction of a strawman hardware and software implementation. A prototype switch controller and timestamp generator have been completed and are in test. Detailed documentation on the algorithms, protocols and experiments conducted are given in various reports and papers published. Abstracts of this literature are included in the bibliography at the end of this report, which serves as an extended executive summary