Performance analysis and management of RPR (resilient packet ring) rings attached to an new large layer 2 (L2) networks (NLL2N)

Abstract

The volume of Internet traffic is growing, which calls for the transmission capacity of the underlying infrastructure to be continuously extended. It also requires a tide management which can maintain a good performance. A closer look at Internet infrastructure reveals that it architecturally relies on a three level hierarchy consisting of backbone networks, metropolitan area networks, and local access networks. The Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), or metro networks for short, interconnect the backbone networks with the local access networks that carry the data from and to the individual users. By employing advanced Local Area Network (LAN) technologies (i.e., Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)), and broadband access, (i.e., Digital Subscriber Loop (DSL) and cable modems), access networks provide increasing amounts of bandwidth. Most existing metro networks are based on Synchronous Optical NETwork/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SONET/SDH) technology, a circuit-switched networking technology. Similar to Ethernet switches, and quite unlike SONET/SDH add/drop multiplexers, RPR switches can be plugged into and removed from a ring dynamically. No advance provisioning is required and nothing more than a few milliseconds of outage is resulted. RPR and Ethernet share a lot in common. RPR’s logical MAC interface, in its default usage, is exactly the same as Ethernet’s. RPR’s frames look very similar to Ethernet frames, with slightly more fields added. Any service that runs on top of Ethernet also runs on top of RPR. Every service that Ethernet provides is also available by RPR. Ethernet and RPR work together seamlessly nbridged/switched networks. RPR is closely aligned with Ethernet and completely interoperable with other 802 MACs. RPR has been implemented in LAN and MAN network and works adequately, but it has not been implemented or tested with a large L2 network. Having RPR rings attached directly to a large L2 networks, of different types of SONET/SDH, Ethernet, and GbE will be an interesting challenge because we have to adapt RPR rings to all these L2 networks. In our research, we are proposing an alternate way to design campus (MAN), Local Area Network (LAN) andWide Area Network (WAN). And, to employ RPR rings for the backbone transport. RPR rings will be attached directly to a different L2 networks. It could be placed between two SONET/SDH rings or between two GbE segments and so on. Our new large networks or large configurations that we propose will be named: New Large L2 Network (NLL2N). Using RPR rings to interconnect various locations on a campus or in an enterprise environment provide a superior value to the customer and bring Carrier Ethernet qualities to the backbone transport network. During our research, we will investigate RPR over Ethernet (RPRoE), RPR over SONET (RPRoSONET), SONET over Ethernet (SONEToE) and we will demonstrate that RPR, Ethernet, and SONET could be integrated together in the same Layer 2 Network. In our research we will explain and detail the use of RPRoE and SONEToRPR, and the integration of all of them to create a New Large Layer 2 Network (NLL2N) and point out the benefits of it. We comprehensively evaluate the management and the performance of our proposed architecture, as well as, the underlying performance enhancing techniques for various network configurations and traffic scenarios, by means of experiments analysis and simulations.

Date	27 Jun 2016
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Michel Kadoch (Supervisor)