Proposal of a Packet Optical Transport Node for Next Generation Networks

In order to reduce packet-processing rate without requiring changes in the end systems, a simplified and more scalable packet switch forwarding mechanism, patented in Ericsson, has been proposed. It is based on a proprietary burst structure consisting of a group of frames of the same flow headed by a control frame and transmitted spaced by a proprietary inter-frame gap. That allows recognizing frames of the same burst at transit nodes and consequently to change dynamically burst content and size across the network on the basis of the available bandwidth and intermediate grooming opportunities. These features make it a very competitive approach in the context of packet optical transport being able to support multi-granular switching, from packet up to wavelength switching. Seamless and efficient integration with DWDM system is also provided through a new proposed mechanism for dynamic load balancing among different Ethernet parallel links, which takes advantages from burst sequence number information carried by the Ethernet burst control frame to re-order bursts of a same flow at each transit node. Such mechanism allows to support flow splitting among different output links improving bandwidth utilization and allowing intra-wavelength grooming.