Protection switching is important in a Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Fifth Generation (5G) fronthaul network and for ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC) types of applications. For example, protection switching requirements may necessitate an under one millisecond (msec) low loss and low latency protection switch over to, among other things, avoid a cell reset and support the emerging area of URLLC. To address those types of challenges, techniques are presented herein that support, among other things, a dedicated protection mechanism that is handled in a data plane where such protection switching is triggered in the data plane itself without any protocol interaction. Aspects of the techniques presented herein encompass, among other things, the dynamic configuration of a re-timer buffer depth, a custom extension header in a Radio over Ethernet (RoE) packet to support the conveyance of an indication of a path failure, little dependency on the transport network, etc
