An Evolutionary Approach to End-to-End Addressing and Routing in All-Ethernet Wide-Area Networks

While the introduction of new Ethernet-based wide-area solutions, such as provider-backbone bridging traffic engineering- PBB-TE, paves a way for Ethernet to become a carrier class service, it is restricted to the metro area and hence unable to provision global end-to-end communication. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for all-Ethernet wide area networking that involves a unique addressing and routing mechanism, and leads to a scalable, hierarchical and service-oriented transport network architecture. The scalability is achieved by means of abstraction of any irregular physical topology into a regular logical topology, based on the concept of binary trees. The regular logical topology is represented with logical 1 x 2 Ethernet switches as the fundamental building blocks which allow switching using a unique binary addresses in a simple and automated fashion. We propose an evolutionary architecture to provide end-to-end Ethernet routes using binary addresses embedded in stacked VLAN tags on native Ethernet frames, in line with the emerging standards. The results show that a significant simplification of wide-area internetworking can be achieved, while supporting carrier-grade network performance with all-Ethernet features.