Packet-based Lane Bundling for Terabit-LAN

We propose packet-based lane bundling (PLB) that provides an ideal aggregated bandwidth link for an application. PLB uses time information to align packets and allows a dynamic lane and/or path change, a large difference in transmission delays among lanes, and so on. The basic performance of PLB in 10 Gb/s times 2 lanes is verified using an estimation board that is newly developed to evaluate the basic functions used for Terabit-LANs. The evaluation shows that PLB achieves a very low delay variation that is almost the same as that under back-to-back conditions. The difference is approximately 10 ns when the transmission delay varies from 10 mus to 1 s.