A modular Gigabit Ethernet backbone for NEPTUNE and other ocean observatories

Ethernet is the most popular technology used for local area networks (LANs). Recently, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) technology has successfully competed with SONET and other legacy alternatives such as ATM and frame relay for metropolitan area network (WAN) implementations. This paper describes a modular ocean observatory node design resulting from design activities of the NEPTUNE observatory data communications team. Internal node modules based on Gigabit Ethernet, point-to-point wave division multiplexing (WDM) and TCP/IP (Internet) protocol technologies are employed to define communications building blocks used in the design of the NEPTUNE regional scale ocean observatory communications system and are also applicable to coastal, buoyed and autonomous observatory nodes.