As parallelism becomes critically important in the semiconductor technology, high-performance computing, and cloud applications, parallel network systems will increasingly follow suit. Today, parallelism is an essential architectural feature of 40 100 400 Gigabit Ethernet standards, whereby high speed Ethernet systems are equipped with multiple parallel network interfaces. This creates new network topology abstractions and new technology requirements: instead of a single high capacity network link, multiple Ethernet end-points and interfaces need to be considered together with multiple links in form of discrete parallel paths. This new paradigm is enabling implementations of various new features to improve overall system performance. In this paper, we analyze the performance of parallel network systems with network coding. In particular, by using random LNC (RLNC), - a code without the need for decoding, we can make use of the fact that we have codes that are both distributed (removing the need for coordination or optimization of resources) and composable (without the need to exchange code information), leading to a fully stateless operation. We propose a novel theoretical modeling framework, including derivation of the upper and lower bounds as well as an expected value of the differential delay of parallel paths, and the resulting queue size at the receiver. The results show a great promise of network system parallelism in combination with RLNC: with a proper set of design parameters, the differential delay and the buffer size at the Ethernet receiver can be reduced significantly, while the cross-layer design and routing can be greatly simplified.
Recently, physical layer security in the optical layer has gained significant traction. Security treats in optical networks generally impact the reliability of optical transmission. Linear Network Coding (LNC) can protect from both the security treats in form of eavesdropping and faulty transmission due to jamming. LNC can mix original data to become incomprehensible for an attacker and also extend original data by coding redundancy, thus protecting a data from errors injected via jamming attacks. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of LNC to balance reliable transmission and security in optical networks. To this end, we combine the coding process with data flow parallelization of the source and propose and compare optimal and randomized path selection methods for parallel transmission. The study shows that a combination of data parallelization, LNC and randomization of path selection increases security and reliability of the transmission. We analyze the so-called catastrophic security treat of the network and show that in case of conventional transmission scheme and in absence of LNC, an attacker could eavesdrop or disrupt a whole secret data by accessing only one edge in a network. Parallel transmission, as defined in high-speed Ethernet standards, enables to use less expensive optoelectronics and offers backwards compatibility with legacy Optical Transport Network (OTN) infrastructure. However, optimal parallel transmission does not scale to large networks, as it requires computationally expensive multipath routing algorithms to minimize differential delay, and thus the required buffer size, optimize traffic splitting ratio, and ensure frame synchronization. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for high-speed Ethernet, which we refer to as network coded parallel transmission, capable of effective buffer management and frame synchronization without the need for complex multipath algorithms in the OTN layer. We show that using network coding can reduce the delay caused by packet reordering at the receiver, thus requiring a smaller overall buffer size, while improving the network throughput. We design the framework in full compliance with high-speed Ethernet standards specified in IEEE802.3ba and present solutions for network encoding, data structure of coded parallel transmission, buffer management and decoding at the receiver side. The proposed network coded parallel transmission framework is simple to implement and represents a potential major breakthrough in the system design of future high-speed Ethernet. As optical networks evolve towards more dynamicity and an ever more efficient and elastic spectrum utilization, a more integrated, fault tolerant and system efficient design is becoming critical. To increase efficiency of spectral resource in bit rate per Hz (bit s Hz), high-level modulation formats are used, challenged by the accompanying optical impairments and the resulting limitation of optical reach. Previous work has addressed the issue of optical reach and transmission fault tolerance in the physical layer by deploying various FEC schemes and by a careful design of optical transceivers and links. This paper uses a different approach, applicable to link and networking layers. We propose a novel theoretical framework, whereby a randomized linear network coding (LNC) is applied to the main optical path, and in parallel, an auxiliary optical path is used at much lower transmission speeds, i.e., in addition to the main path. With the reception of the auxiliary path, as we analytically show, the system is highly tolerant to bit errors and packet loss caused by optical impairments in the main path, whereby alleviating the constraints on optical transmission quality and indirectly achieving better optical reach and spectral efficiency. The results are shown for a case study of high-speed Ethernet end-system transmitted over optical OFDM networks, which due to the inherent system-level parallelism in both networks, present one of the most interesting candidate technologies for the proposed method to yield best performance. Parallel transmission is a known technique of transmitting flows over multiple paths from a source towards the same destination. In high-speed Ethernet standards, for instance, large bandwidth flows are inverse-multiplexed into multiple lower-speed flows and transmitted in parallel. However, when flows traverse different paths, attention needs to be paid to the resulting differential delay, which requires computationally expensive path optimizations and large buffering at the receiver. In this paper, we show analytically that linear network coding can significantly reduce the buffering in high-speed Ethernet systems at a price of en decoding overhead, while relaxing the requirements on path optimality. We implement the proposed decoding buffer model according to the IEEE 802.3ba standard, and show that linear network coding reduces the buffer size up to 40 as compared to systems without coding. With linear network coding, input interfaces of the destination node can deploy relatively smaller buffers, which is critical for wider practical deployment of high-speed Ethernet systems at 100 Gbps and beyond.