Ethernet Congestion Manager characteristics, calibration and analysis

Abstract

Following the dominance of Ethernet in local area, campus and enterprise network, efforts are in progress in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to extend Ethernet into metro networks [11]. The major challenge for deploying this technology in metro networks and Wide Area Network (WAN) is to guarantee the Quality of services (QOS) [1]. Nevertheless, congestion problems can be harmful to QoS. Actually, networks are increasing in size and complexity and new network services are deployed, the management becomes more complex and congestion can become a serious problem. Congestion control mechanisms control congestion in nodes which suffer from lack of resources. Congestion control mechanisms have to be complying with IEEE802.1 specifications. Our investigation will be concentrated on ECM (Ethernet Congestion Manager) mechanism. We have studied ECM algorithm, we have suggested some scenarios and tests then based on simulations results ECM performance analysis are deduced.