Ethernet-over-SONET(EoS) over WDM in Optical Wide-Area Networks (WANs): Benefits and Challenges

Ethernet has been playing an increasingly important role in wide area networks (WANs), from both a service perspective and a transport-technology perspective. Unlike its dominant presence in local area networks (LANs), Ethernet in WANs has been increasing its popularity in three different directions, i.e., Ethernet-based layer-2 virtual private network (L2VPN) over layer-3 network, Ethernet over SONET (EoS), and Ethernet directly over WDM channels or optical fibers. In this paper, we investigate the benefits and challenges of using next-generation SONET/SDH techniques—namely SONET/SDH virtual concatenation (VCAT) and link-capacity adjustment scheme (LCAS)—to support Ethernet-based data services in intelligent optical WDM wide area networks. In particular, we evaluate the network performance improvement after employing VCAT. In order to fully utilize VCATs inverse-multiplexing capability, several simple and effective heuristic algorithms are proposed and evaluated.*Part of the work was accomplished while Keyao Zhu was a Ph.D. student in the Networks Research Lab. at University of California, Davis, under the supervision of Professor Biswanath Mukherjee. Summarized versions of this paper were presented at the IEEE/OSA Optical Fiber Communication Conferences OFC03 and OFC04 in Atlanta, GA, in March 2003 and in Los Angeles, CA, in March 2004, respectively.Corresponding author