ETN – Ethernet Transport Network for 5G Mobile Transport, Metro, and DCI Network

The past decade has witnessed the large shipments of Ethernet switches and IP routers. The wide availability of commodity Ethernet ASICs and the publicly open interoperable Ethernet/IP network standards have made Ethernet/IP equipment the preferred deployment option in the campus, data center, and mobile service operator’s 3G/4G LTE backhaul network. In this paper, we present an end-to-end Ethernet Transport Network (ETN) framework which features multi-service access, deterministic forwarding latency, hard traffic isolation, hierarchical traffic multiplexing, flexible and adjustable L1/L2/L3 forwarding, and multi-layer OAM mechanism. We envision ETN to be a unified solution for the future 5G mobile transport, metro, and data-center interconnects (DCI) network. In the end, we present the preliminary evaluation of our ETN prototype switch boxes implemented using commercial FPGAs and share our future vision for ETN evolution.