Toward Benchmarks for Evaluation of Forwarding Strategies in Metro Ethernet Networks

Major Challenge for deploying Ethernet in metro area networks is to guarantee the quality of service and traffic engineering requirements. In the literature, there are many forwarding strategies proposed by researchers to overcome this challenge. One significant difficulty in assessing and comparing the different forwarding strategies proposed is the lack of a standard test environment or benchmark. Currently in the absence of a standard benchmark, each researcher considers some typical test environments to demonstrate the performance achievement of his proposed forwarding strategy. In some cases, the test environment is so far from realistic environments. A Metro Ethernet Forwarding benchmark must include some standard architecture, standard workloads, and a standard set of evaluation criterions. This paper describes the features of the analytical and experimental benchmarks mostly used in related works for the evaluation of forwarding strategies in metro Ethernet networks.