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.
The emerging high-speed Ethernet is expected to take full advantage of the currently deployed optical infrastructure, i.e., optical transport network over wavelength division multiplexing (OTN WDM) networks. Parallel transmission is a viable option towards this goal, as exemplified by several IEEE and ITU-T standards. The optical virtual concatenation protocol in the OTN layer defined in ITU-T G.709 enables high-speed Ethernet signals to be decoupled into low rate virtual containers. The multiple lane distribution layer defined in IEEE 802.3ba facilitates the optical parallel transmission by stripping Ethernet signals into multiple low rate lanes which can be mapped onto optical channels. In this paper, we propose a new optimization framework for parallel transmission in OTN WDM networks to support high-speed Ethernet. We formulate the parallel transmission optimization as an integer linear programming problem encompassing three sub-problems: parallel wavelength routing and assignment, usage of electronic buffering for skew compensation, and bufferless parallel transmission. To reduce computational complexity, we deploy multi-objective evolutionary optimization. The numerical results show that parallel transmission in OTN WDM networks is feasible, and optimal solutions can be obtained with minimum resource consumption and bufferless system design.