Optical Network Design for a Multiline-Rate Carrier-Grade Ethernet Under Transmission-Range Constraints

Ethernet is a success story in local area networks (LAN). Efforts for extending its boundaries beyond LAN to the carrier's backbone networks are in progress. The authors study the problem of designing reliable and cost-efficient high-rate (100 Gbit/s) carrier-grade Ethernet in a multiline-rate optical network under signal transmission-range constraints. Reliability is achieved using shared-path protection at the connection level Ethernet tunnel in this paper.