An Evolutionary Approach to End-to-End Addressing and Routing in all-Ethernet Wide-Area Networks

While the introduction of new Ethernet-based wide-area solutions, such as provider-backbone bridging traffic engineering - PBB-TE, paves a way for Ethernet to become a carrier class service, it is restricted to the metro area and hence unable to provision global end-to-end communication. In this paper, the authors propose a new scheme for all-Ethernet wide area networking that involves a unique addressing and routing mechanism, and leads to a scalable, hierarchical and service-oriented transport network architecture. The scalability is achieved by means of abstraction of any irregular physical topology into a regular logical topology, based on the concept of binary trees.