Traffic engineering for ethernet over SONET/SDH: advances and frontiers

Continued growth in data services coupled with the entrenchment of existing carrier infrastructures have inevitably forced a convergence of SONET/SDH and Ethernet technologies. As a result, the very notion of Ethernet connectivity has expanded beyond traditional local area domains into broader metro/wide area settings. The key enabling advances have come in the form of improved SONET/SDH provisioning features as well as new carrier Ethernet services standards. These provisions have allowed carriers to build and deploy much improved multigrade point-to-point Ethernet line services and have also opened up new challenges for extended multipoint offerings. This article looks at this evolving area and summarizes recent advances in EoS traffic engineering. It also highlights some key future challenges and presents a novel scheme for multipoint services provisioning in EoS settings.