Improving resilience in ethernet based access networks

In recent years, Ethernet has started its development as the link layer technology for first mile broadband access and even for Metropolitan Area Networks. In this paper the issues of designing resilient access aggregation networks are addressed. The resilience objective is that in a case of single failures in the access aggregation network the operation is continued with only a very small interception of data transmission. An evaluation and comparison of several strategies for the resilient application of switched Ethernet in access aggregation networks is given in the paper. The comparison is based on an evaluation scheme which is introduced in the paper.