Low-cost resilience schemes for the optical Ethernet

Optical Ethernet (OE) architectures represent a simple and low cost implementation for the layer 2 transport of IP packets directly over the optical layer. The limiting factor for the widespread deployment of low cost OE architectures is represented by the lack of some operation, administration and maintenance (OA&M) features, such as resilience. Optical layer protection represents a low-cost resilience scheme for OE links. This paper presents the experimental results of low-cost protection implementations based on different failure detection and protection activation schemes for IP over OE networks. Specifically, a dedicated span protection scheme and an evolution for shared protection based on GMPLS signaling in transparent domains is presented. Experimental results show that recovery times in the millisecond range are achieved.