An End User Enabled MAC-in-MAC Encapsulation Scheme for Metro-Ethernet

Easy management and maintenance and highly cost effective equipment make Ethernet an attractive technology for deploying metropolitan area networks (MANs). However, Ethernet has poor scalability due to use flat addressing scheme. To make metro-Ethernet more scalable, the provider edge (PE) nodes can use MAC-in-MAC (MiM) encapsulation scheme for frame forwarding. The MiM encapsulation scheme reduces the forwarding table size in the core nodes (CNs), but not in the PE nodes which need to maintain the entries of mapping end userpsilas MAC address to PEpsilas MAC address. In this paper, we propose an End user enabled MAC-in-MAC (EMiM) encapsulation scheme for Metro-Ethernet. In the proposed scheme, a userpsilas MAC address as well as its PE nodepsilas MAC address are associated with its address resolution protocol (ARP) entry. The modified ARP entry allows the end user to do MiM encapsulation. Hence a PE node does not need to maintain the entries of mapping end userpsilas MAC address to PE nodepsilas MAC address, thus significantly reducing the forwarding table size. The proposed scheme sustains Ethernetpsilas plug-and-play feature and provides high scalability. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce up to 65% maximum forwarding table size in PE nodes.