New forwarding strategy for metro Ethernet networks based on hierarchical addressing

Current Ethernet technology relies on Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). As the name suggests, STP creates a spanning tree within a network of connected layer-2 Ethernet switches, and disables those links that are not part of the spanning tree, leaving a single active path between any two network nodes. Because of lack of any traffic engineering mechanism in STP, there is not any load balancing on links and switches. This causes a huge load on some links and switches especially close to the root node. In our previous works, we have suggested some forwarding strategies such as: BST and SSS to overcome this problem. In this paper, we propose a new forwarding strategy based on hierarchical addressing named Hierarchical Forwarding Strategy (HFS), to improve the performance of the previous forwarding strategies. Simulation results show the improvements of HFS in comparison to STP and SSS.