Frame Assembly in Packet Core Networks - Overview and Experimental Results

Literature has proposed Frame Assembly and its variants multiple times to cope with the ever increasing switching density in consequence of increasing link rates. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art networks do not implement and apply it. Skepticism of practitioners and investors regard not only the effective gain of frame switching, but also questions of control, interfacing and performance impact on the existing Ethernet/IP infrastructure. We present an operational prototype network with frame assembly in its core that seamlessly interfaces to existing Ethernet technology and seamlessly integrates to a standard conform GMPLS control plane. We show the manageable additional effort of assembly at the network edge, the direction how to integrate such network into existing control structures, but also the limited and well controlled impact of assembly on the timing of client application.