Resilient Ethernet Ring for Survivable IP Metro Backbone

The near universal embrace of IP-based services and Ethernet traffic motivate many carriers to migrate network infrastructures away from the TDM world to a packetized network. Some efforts focus on seeking new approaches to architectural design that reduce costs without compromising performance in terms of network reliability. On the other hand, the improvement of Ethernet transmission speed and distance has made it a formidable competitor in backbone transmissions. In this paper we propose an efficient approach to provide survivable and cost-effective IP metro backbone. The proposed resilient Ethernet ring (RER) mechanism supports fast automatic restoration on the order of milliseconds, often in sub-50 ms by provisioning a family of distributed and autonomic "resilience cycle (R-cycle)". The proposed novel mechanism has been implemented on our 10 Gbps network processor based multi-service Ethernet platform. It is shown that satisfactory performance and deterministic fast recovery can be guaranteed based on the proposed R-cycle algorithm.