An overview of shortest path mechanisms for Metro-Ethernet networks

Providing diverse broadband services economically at all time with high quality of services will be a major challenge for the telecommunication community. Accordingly, this imposes stringent performance requirements that could not be filled by the classical switched Ethernet network. Many key features should be defined to enable the use of Ethernet for constrained applications. In this context, the route selection mechanism impacts the network service delivery performance. Therefore, many recent researches are focalized on proposing new routing mechanisms for Metro-Ethernet networks. This paper describes an overview of several Metro-Ethernet shortest path mechanisms by classifying those mechanisms into distributed and centralized. Furthermore, we analysed and highlighted the advantages and the limitations of each studied mechanism.