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

Network emulation focusing on QoS-Oriented satellite communication

This chapter proposes network emulation basics and a complete case study of QoS-oriented Satellite Communication

Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs

Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently. Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve datacenter network performance. In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties, general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing, multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper, we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Resource management research in ethernet passive optical networks

The last decades, we have witnessed different phenomenology in the telecommunications sector. One of them is the widespread use of the Internet, which has brought a sharp increase in traffic, forcing suppliers to continuously expand the capacity of networks. In the near future, Internet will be composed of long-range highspeed optical networks; a number of wireless networks at the edge; and, in between, several access technologies. Today one of the main problems of the Internet is the bottleneck in the access segment. To address this issue the Passive Optical Networks (PONs) are very likely to succeed, due to their simplicity, low-cost, and increased bandwidth. A PON is made up of fiber optic cabling and passive splitters and couplers that distribute an optical signal to connectors that terminate each fiber segment. Among the different PON technologies, the Ethernet-PON (EPON) is a great alternative to satisfy operator and user needs, due to its cost, flexibility and interoperability with other technologies. One of the most interesting challenges in such technologies relates to the scheduling and allocation of resources in the upstream (shared) channel, i.e., the resource management. The aim of this thesis is to study and evaluate current contributions and propose new efficient solutions to address the resource management issues mainly in EPON. Key issues in this context are future end-user needs, quality of service (QoS) support, energy-saving and optimized service provisioning for real-time and elastic flows. This thesis also identifies research opportunities, issue recommendations and proposes novel mechanisms associated with access networks based on optical fiber technologies.Postprint (published version

Per-Priority Flow Control (Ppfc) Framework For Enhancing Qos In Metro Ethernet

Day by day Internet communication and services are experiencing an increase in variety and quantity in their capacity and demand. Thus, making traffic management and quality of service (QoS) approaches for optimization of the Internet become a challenging area of research; meanwhile flow control and congestion control will be considered as significant fundamentals for the traffic control especially on the high speed Metro Ethernet. IEEE had standardized a method (IEEE 802.3x standard), which provides Ethernet Flow Control (EFC) using PAUSE frames as MAC control frames in the data link layer, to enable or disable data frame transmission. With the initiation of Metro Carrier Ethernet, the conventional ON/OFF IEEE 802.3x approach may no longer be sufficient. Therefore, a new architecture and mechanism that offer more flexible and efficient flow and congestion control, as well as better QoS provisioning is now necessary

On the Rollout of Network Slicing in Carrier Networks: A Technology Radar

Network slicing is a powerful paradigm for network operators to support use cases with widely diverse requirements atop a common infrastructure. As 5G standards are completed, and commercial solutions mature, operators need to start thinking about how to integrate network slicing capabilities in their assets, so that customer-facing solutions can be made available in their portfolio. This integration is, however, not an easy task, due to the heterogeneity of assets that typically exist in carrier networks. In this regard, 5G commercial networks may consist of a number of domains, each with a different technological pace, and built out of products from multiple vendors, including legacy network devices and functions. These multi-technology, multi-vendor and brownfield features constitute a challenge for the operator, which is required to deploy and operate slices across all these domains in order to satisfy the end-to-end nature of the services hosted by these slices. In this context, the only realistic option for operators is to introduce slicing capabilities progressively, following a phased approach in their roll-out. The purpose of this paper is to precisely help designing this kind of plan, by means of a technology radar. The radar identifies a set of solutions enabling network slicing on the individual domains, and classifies these solutions into four rings, each corresponding to a different timeline: (i) as-is ring, covering today’s slicing solutions; (ii) deploy ring, corresponding to solutions available in the short term; (iii) test ring, considering medium-term solutions; and (iv) explore ring, with solutions expected in the long run. This classification is done based on the technical availability of the solutions, together with the foreseen market demands. The value of this radar lies in its ability to provide a complete view of the slicing landscape with one single snapshot, by linking solutions to information that operators may use for decision making in their individual go-to-market strategies.H2020 European Projects 5G-VINNI (grant agreement No. 815279) and 5G-CLARITY (grant agreement No. 871428)Spanish national project TRUE-5G (PID2019-108713RB-C53