Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. INTRODUCTION
Ethernet [1] and SDH [2] are landmark technolo
gies for
computer and telecommunications networking, respe
ctively.
However, digital network convergence has pushed
both to
work together. This demand drove the creation of
a set of
new technologies to efciently and exibly combi
ne both
worlds. The Generic Framing Procedure (GFP)
[3] provides
several functions to adapt Ethernet trafc to trans
portation
frame if needed.
Also, IEEE 802.3 [7] denes an Inter-Packet Gap (IGP)
between Ethernet frames to provide adequate recovery ti
mes
for procedures in the link and physical layers, such as cyc
ling
circuitry from transmit to receive mode in half-duplex
operation. The IGP for 10BASE-T standard is 9.6 seconds,
while
it is 0.96 s for 100BASE-T. This is equivalent to 12
bytes
of emission time in these standards. The IGP is related to
the
Inter-Frame Spacing (IFS). According to [11], the IFS is
the
sum of at least 12 bytes of IGP, plus a 7-octet Preamble
and
a 1-octet SFD. Also, Ramamurti et al. [12] discusses IFS
and
IGP, and IGP use for rate adaptation in EoS.
In July 1995, IEEE standard 802.3u was ofcially approv
ed,
creating what became known as Fast Ethernet [13]. Fast
Ethernet refers to a compatible IEEE 802.3 standard oper
ating
at 100 Mbit/s. According to Tanenbaum [14], all Fast Eth
ernet
standards were based on hubs, switches, twisted pairs and
beroptics; coaxial cables were not allowed. For example,
Ethernet IEEE 100BASE-T [7] uses two twisted pairs
with
a maximum segment length of 100 meters. Note that the
Ethernet frame remained the same as in 10BASE-T. With
100
Mbit/s available to the user stations, even higher data rate
s
become necessary in servers and high capacity links.
Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) was developed to interconnect
10/100 Mbit/s switches and to provide higher data rates.
The Gigabit Ethernet standardization effort started with th
e
IEEE 802.3z [15] standard in 1996, and industrial interest
in
this technology led to the creation of the Gigabit Ethernet
Alliance, which was organized to facilitate and accelerate
the
introduction of this technology into the market. GbE den
ed
support for single-mode optical ber (1000BASE-LX),
greatly
increasing network reachability.
In 2002, Ethernet standard IEEE Std 802.3ae-2002 introduced 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) [16], [17]. The goal o
f 10
GbE was to cover distances from 300 meters to 40 km. O
nly
optical physical layer options were dened. In addition, 1
0
GbE does not support half- duplex operation or CSMA/C
D;