Etherlay: An Overlay Enhancement for Metro Ethernet Networks

The ubiquitous Ethernet technology has propelled itself into a wide-scale adoption for Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN). Despite recent advancements in Ethernet and commercialization of the first generation of MEN, the fundamental technology does not meet the expectations that carriers have traditionally held in terms of network resiliency and load management. This paper addresses these two issues. We propose a new concept of overlay network in the Ethernet layer, called Etherlay, that increases the resiliency of the MEN while provisioning the support for load balancing. As a result, the capacity in terms of network throughput is greatly enhanced while almost avoiding performance hits for any re-convergence in case of failures. Compared to the standard protocols, Etherlay´s total throughput gain ranges from 5.93% to 20.7% in the face of failure; while load balancing capability increases an additional 16% to 60% of the total throughput.