Managed filtering data base forwarding and protection in carrier class ring ethernet

Abstract

Ethernet ring protection is gaining in importance based on OAM (Operations,Administration and Maintenance) as Ethernet technology is being standardized by the ITU-T G.8032 working group for a carrier-class Ethernet ring network. Also, the IEEE802.17 RPR standard, i.e., resilient packet ring, specifies a variant of an Ethernet ring and protection. We present a managed FDB scheme in the framework of the OAM standards that provides cost-effective forwarding for higher network utilization. We present a novel protection scheme in which an Ethernet MAC filtering database(FDB) is actively managed to provide optimized protection traffic patterns on failure utilizing APS (Automatic Protection Switching) messaging. The proposed scheme demonstrates an immediate MAC forwarding switching for protection within 50 ms without the traffic overshoot phenomenon that has been a problem observed in the FDB flush scheme. Furthermore, we show link traffic volume comparisons between the FDB flush scheme and our scheme in a protected Ethernet ring network using network simulations.