Optimal and Efficient Design of Ring Instances in Metro Ethernet Networks

Abstract

Ethernet Ring Protection (ERP) switching has emerged to provide sub-50 ms of restoration times, allowing Ethernet technologies to expand beyond enterprises to next generation metro and backbone networks, providing much needed services to interconnect for instance dispersed and high-bandwidth data centers. This paper considers the problem of efficiently designing and planning an Ethernet-based metro network with ERP protection method. While previous recent work has addressed such design problem, none has considered the capabilities of exploiting multiple ERP instances, leaving behind some advantages that network providers could tap into to provide their customers with desirable quality of service support. Resource planning in ERPbased Ethernet network is, however, a complex problem due to the challenges associated with the logical link block selection as well as ring hierarchy selection. ERP instances add, however, another dimension of combinatorial complexity, making the design problem completely intractable. To address this issue, we resort to large scale optimization tools and present a novel primal-dual decomposition of the original problem using column generation. We show that our method is very scalable and obtain several design insights on various representative network instances.Index Terms-Ethernet ring protection, network design, next generation metro networks, VLAN assignment.

Reliable networking in Ethernet ring mesh networks using regular topologies

“…Since there is no clear method for the development of the network in more number of nodes, the network is considered as an irregular network. Assi et al [9] considered the joint problem of RPL selection and ring hierarchy selection when routing traffic flows in presence of multiple ERP instances. They obtained several insights and guidelines for network operators to provide their customers with the required quality of service they demand.…”

“…Lack of any contributions to topology design Not evaluating all irregular topologies Not assessing any regular topology [9] Efficient RPL selection and ring hierarchy selection…”

“…We chose this type of chordal ring because the number of its nodes fits other topologies discussed in this paper. On the other hand, the number of nodes of ERMs in real conditions is between 8 and 16 nodes (up to 16 nodes) [2,9]. However, we will also study the topology of CHR4 (16; 2) to assess the all-terminal reliability in more number of nodes.…”

“…In the meantime, reliability has always been considered as one of the basic parameters in Ethernet ring mesh networks (ERMs) [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. However, regardless of using ERP or HSR schemes, an Ethernet single-ring mesh network cannot be fault tolerant in more than one link (i.e.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, all topologies investigated in the past are of this kind. For example, shared link topology, redundant link topology, and shared node topology [1,[9][10][11]. These topologies will be discussed further in Sect.…”