Demonstration of Omnipresent Ethernet: A Novel Metro End-to-End Communication System Using Binary ${+}$ Source Routing and Carrier Ethernet

A new end-to-end communication solution called Omnipresent Ethernet (OEthernet) is demonstrated through a test-bed. The solution takes into consideration contemporary interconnection methodologies in enterprise/provider networks from a generalized graph perspective. The aim is to be able to convert any network graph into a known symmetric graph by simple algorithmic treatment. The virtual graph that we create is a binary tree-whose representative node is a binary node with a 1 × 2 interconnection architecture. The binary tree transformation of irregular network graphs leads to source routing and binary routing which results in significant performance and cost advantages. Addressing and routing in binary trees can be made possible at the Ethernet layer taking advantage of the advances in Carrier Ethernet. The resulting OEthernet solution facilitates communication without IP-enabling applications to ride entirely on OEthernet frames. In this paper, we built a test-bed that demonstrates the OEthernet concept. The test-bed is a 25 node binary tree, exemplified by a metro core (optical backbone) and an access edge network in optical as well as copper domains. The test-bed supports triple play applications, in particular, video-on-demand. Measurements are made for latency, jitter and throughput and we observe that the OEthernet solution is lower cost, more effective and energy efficient than regular IP networking approaches. An all-optical version of the OEthernet solution is also presented.