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

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2018, nr 1

kwartalni

Resource allocation and performance analysis problems in optical networks

Optical networks pose a rich variety of new design and performance analysis problems. Typically, the static design problems belong to the field of combinatorial optimisation, whereas decision-making and performance analysis problems are best treated using appropriate stochastic models. This dissertation focuses on certain issues in resource allocation and performance evaluation of backbone wavelength-routed (WR) networks and metropolitan area optical burst switching (OBS) networks. The first two parts of the thesis consider heuristic algorithms for the static routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) and logical topology design (LTD) problems that arise in the context of WR networks. In a static RWA problem, one is asked to establish a given set of lightpaths (or light trees) in an optical WR network with given constraints, where the objective often is to minimise the number of wavelength channels required. In LTD problem, the number of wavelength channels is given and one is asked to decide on the set of lightpaths so that, for instance, the mean sojourn time of packets travelling at the logical layer is minimised. In the thesis, several heuristic algorithms for both the RWA and LTD problems are described and numerical results are presented. The third part of the thesis studies the dynamic control problem where connection requests, i.e. lightpath requests, arrive according to a certain traffic pattern and the task is to establish one lightpath at a time in the WR optical network so that the expected revenue is maximised or the expected cost is minimised. Typically, the goal of optimisation is to minimise some infinite time horizon cost function, such as the blocking probability. In this thesis, the dynamic RWA problem is studied in the framework of Markov decision processes (MDP). An algorithmic approach is proposed by which any given heuristic algorithm can be improved by applying the so-called first policy iteration (FPI) step of the MDP theory. Relative costs of states needed in FPI are estimated by on-the-fly simulations. The computational burden of the approach is alleviated by introducing the importance sampling (IS) technique with FPI, for which an adaptive algorithm is proposed for adjusting the optimal IS parameters at the same time as data are collected for the decision-making analysis. The last part of the thesis considers OBS networks, which represent an intermediate step towards full optical packet switching networks. In OBS networks, the data are transferred using optical bursts consisting of several IP packets going to the same destination. On the route of the burst, temporary reservations are made only for the time during which the burst is transmitted. This thesis focuses on fairness issues in OBS networks. It is demonstrated that fairness can be improved by using fibre delay lines together with Just-Enough-Time protocol (JET). Furthermore, by choosing the routes in an appropriate way one can also reach a satisfactory level of fairness and, at the same time, lower the overall blocking probability. Possible scheduling policies for metropolitan area OBS ring networks are also studied.reviewe

Actas da 10ª Conferência sobre Redes de Computadores

Universidade do MinhoCCTCCentro AlgoritmiCisco SystemsIEEE Portugal Sectio

Resource allocation and scalability in dynamic wavelength-routed optical networks.

This thesis investigates the potential benefits of dynamic operation of wavelength-routed optical networks (WRONs) compared to the static approach. It is widely believed that dynamic operation of WRONs would overcome the inefficiencies of the static allocation in improving resource use. By rapidly allocating resources only when and where required, dynamic networks could potentially provide the same service that static networks but at decreased cost, very attractive to network operators. This hypothesis, however, has not been verified. It is therefore the focus of this thesis to investigate whether dynamic operation of WRONs can save significant number of wavelengths compared to the static approach whilst maintaining acceptable levels of delay and scalability. Firstly, the wavelength-routed optical-burst-switching (WR-OBS) network architecture is selected as the dynamic architecture to be studied, due to its feasibility of implementation and its improved network performance. Then, the wavelength requirements of dynamic WR-OBS are evaluated by means of novel analysis and simulation and compared to that of static networks for uniform and non-uniform traffic demand. It is shown that dynamic WR-OBS saves wavelengths with respect to the static approach only at low loads and especially for sparsely connected networks and that wavelength conversion is a key capability to significantly increase the benefits of dynamic operation. The mean delay introduced by dynamic operation of WR-OBS is then assessed. The results show that the extra delay is not significant as to violate end-to-end limits of time-sensitive applications. Finally, the limiting scalability of WR-OBS as a function of the lightpath allocation algorithm computational complexity is studied. The trade-off between the request processing time and blocking probability is investigated and a new low-blocking and scalable lightpath allocation algorithm which improves the mentioned trade-off is proposed. The presented algorithms and results can be used in the analysis and design of dynamic WRONs

Analytic modelling and resource dimensioning of optical burst switched networks

The realisation of optical network architectures may hold the key to delivering the enormous bandwidth demands of next generation Internet applications and services. Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a potentially cost-effective switching technique that can satisfy these demands by offering a high bit rate transport service that is bandwidth-efficient under dynamic Internet traffic loads. Although various aspects of OBS performance have been extensively investigated, there remains a need to systematically assess the cost/performance trade-offs involved in dimensioning OBS switch resources in a network. This goal is essential in enabling the future deployment of OBS but poses a significant challenge due to the complexity of obtaining tractable mathematical models applicable to OBS network optimisation. The overall aim of this thesis lies within this challenge. This thesis firstly develops a novel analytic performance model of an OBS node where burst contention is resolved by combined use of Tuneable Wavelength Converters (TWCs) and Fibre Delay Lines (FDLs) connected in an efficient share-per-node configuration. The model uses a two-moment traffic representation that gives a good trade-off between accuracy and complexity, and is suitable for extension to use in network modelling. The OBS node model is then used to derive an approximate analytic model of an OBS network of switches equipped with TWCs and FDLs, again maintaining a two-moment traffic model for each end-to-end traffic path in the network. This allows evaluation of link/route loss rates under different offered traffic characteristics, whereas most OBS network models assume only a single-moment traffic representation. In the last part of this thesis, resource dimensioning of OBS networks is performed by solving single and multi-objective optimisation problems based on the analytic network model. The optimisation objectives relate to equipment cost minimisation and throughput maximisation under end-to-end loss rate constraints. Due to non-convexity of the network performance constraint equations, a search heuristic approach has been taken using a constraint-handling genetic algorithm

Design and protection algorithms for path level aggregation of traffic in WDM metro optical networks

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) promises to offer a cost effective and scalable solution to meet the emerging demands of the Internet. WDM splits the tremendous bandwidth latent in a fiber into multiple non-overlapping wavelength channels, each of which can be operated at the peak electronic rate. Commercial systems with 128 wavelengths and transmission rates of up to 40 Gbps per wavelength have been made possible using state of the art optical technologies to deal with physical impairments. Systems with higher capacities are likely to evolve in the future. The end user requirements for bandwidth, on the other hand, have been ranging from 155 Mbps to 2.5 Gbps. Dedicating a wavelength for each end user will lead to severe underutilization of WDM channels. This brings to forefront the requirement for sharing of bandwidth in a wavelength among multiple end users.;The concept of wavelength sharing among multiple clients is called grooming. Grooming can be done purely at the optical layer (optical grooming) or it can be done with support from the client layer (electronic grooming). The advantage of all optical grooming is the ease of scalability due to its transparency as opposed to electronic grooming which is constrained by electronic bottlenecks. Efforts towards enhancing optical grooming is pursued through increasing optical switching speeds. However, technologies to make optical switches with high speeds, large port counts and low insertion losses have been elusive and may continue to remain so in the near future.;Recently, there have been some research into designing new architectures and protocols focused on optical grooming without resorting to fast optical switching. Typically, this is achieved in three steps: (1) configure the circuit in the form of a path or a tree; (2) use optical devices like couplers or splitters to allow multiple transmitters and/or receivers to share the same circuit; and (3) provide an arbitration mechanism to avoid contention among end users of the circuit. This transparent sharing of the wavelength channel utilizes the network resources better than the conventional low-speed circuit switched approaches. Consequently, it becomes important to quantify the improvement in achieved performance and evaluate if the reaped benefits justify the cost of the required additional hardware and software.;The contribution of this thesis is two fold: (1) developing a new architecture called light-trails as an IP based solution for next generation WDM optical networks, and (2) designing a unified framework to model Path Level Aggregation of Traffic in metrO Optical Networks (PLATOONs). The algorithms suggested here have three features: (1) accounts for four different path level aggregation strategies---namely, point to point (for example, lightpaths), point to multi-point (for example, source based light-trails), multi-point to point (for example, destination based light-trails) and multi-point to multi-point (for example, light-trails); (2) incorporates heterogenous switching architectures; and (3) accommodates multi-rate traffic. Algorithms for network design and survivability are developed for PLATOONs in the presence of both static and dynamic traffic. Connection level dedicated/shared, segregated/mixed protection schemes are formulated for single link failures in the presence of static and dynamic traffic. A simple medium access control protocol that avoids collisions when the channel is shared by multiple clients is also proposed.;Based on extensive simulations, we conclude that, for the studied scenarios, (1) when client layer has no electronic grooming capabilities, light-trails (employing multi-point to multi-point aggregation strategy) perform several orders of magnitude better than lightpaths and (2) when client layer has full electronic grooming capabilities, source based light-trails (employing point to multi-point aggregation strategy) perform the best in wavelength limited scenarios and lightpaths perform the best in transceiver limited scenarios.;The algorithms that are developed here will be helpful in designing optical networks that deploy path level aggregation strategies. The proposed ideas will impact the design of transparent, high-speed all-optical networks.</p