Optical Network Design for a Multiline-Rate Carrier-Grade Ethernet Under Transmission-Range Constraints

Abstract

Ethernet is a success story in local area networks (LAN). Efforts for extending its boundaries beyond LAN to the carriers' backbone networks are in progress. We study the problem of designing reliable and cost-efficient high-rate (100 Gbit/s) carrier-grade Ethernet in a multiline-rate optical network under signal transmission-range constraints. Reliability is achieved using shared-path protection at the connection level (Ethernet tunnel in this study). We construct an auxiliary graph, called mixed topology (MT), using which it is possible to: 1) identify traffic grooming possibilities; 2) select a path which requires the minimum amount of 3R regeneration; and 3) effectively choose the data rate of the channel to be established. Our algorithms, tested on the 17-node German network, resulted in lower network cost and higher resource utilization compared with other schemes.