Broadband data transport protocol for metro Ethernet services

Ethernet is seizing a great role in packet-based metro networks. With the growth of carrier-grade Ethernet it is becoming essential to have a transport protocol that can aid the QoS mechanisms offered by metro Ethernet services while simultaneously taking advantage of the full available bandwidth. For the past three decades much work has been performed to make up for the shortcomings of standard TCP. Most of this work has been based on the tweaking of the additive increase multiplicative decrease (AIMD) parameters. The Ethernet Services transport protocol (ESTP) takes a different approach by making the AIMD parameters vary dynamically based on the traffic policing parameters and congestion feedback that is available at the transport layer. This capability helps the transport protocol make efficient decisions influenced by the network conditions and therefore increasing the utilization efficiency and the overall transmission throughput. It is demonstrated that the increase can be achieved while maintaining fairness over different priority transmissions and a significant increase in utilization is obtained. Two types of scheduling modes are analyzed: strict priority and weighted fair scheduling.