Ethernet-Services Transport Protocol Design oriented to Carrier Ethernet Networks

A Carrier Ethernet Network (CEN) is a versatile, standardized, ubiquitous, carrier-class network. It possess several attributes that distinguish it from Metro Ethernet Networks (MENs), quality of service (QoS) being an integral one. Because CENs are designed to cover large areas (thousands of km) and transmit at high data rates (100 Gbps), these networks have a high bandwidth-delay product (BDP). Long distance transmissions that require data integrity suffer a transport-layer throughput bottleneck effect. Under these conditions, systems (including testbeds) exhibit a detrimental performance evaluation reduction as the round-trip time (RTT) increases. A new transport protocol is proposed to overcome the difficulties these networks incur, while providing QoS guarantees at the transport-layer level, hence maintaining the committed throughput levels established in the service level agreement (SLA). The proposed protocol, which is called Ethernet Services transport protocol (ESTP), is able to obtain congestion level feedback using only layer-4 information rather than assuming congestion based on a single packet loss event. An important aspect of this work is that it is validated by theoretical, simulated, and experimental results.