FCSEA: A Floodless Carrier-grade Scalable Ethernet Architecture

Abstract

This paper proposes Floodless Carrier-grade Scalable Ethernet Architecture (FCSEA) as a completely floodless enhancement of EtherProxy to meet scalability and protection switching requirements of Ethernet in carrier networks. FCSEA uses a priority based cache retention principle, exploits attempt from end node/host to verify connectivity during commissioning and intercepts dynamic configuration (DHCP) messages to ensure an entirely floodless environment for end hosts. This work enhances the ability of EtherProxy to suppress broadcast traffic and adds protection switching support enabling it to function properly in a ring or mesh protected network. FCSEA retains EtherProxy's advantages of autoconfiguration and backward compatibility with existing hardware. Simulation result and analysis with real data is presented to verify effectiveness of FCSEA and to show its suitability over recent SDN based solutions.