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Re: Ethernet over WANs




Bill,

As part of the common carrier industry that uses SONET/SDH all of the time, and
as a person that was involved with codifying the communications stack for Q3, I
wonder where you get the idea that OAM has not been standardized within the
SONET/SDH protocol?  Have your ever heard of the H bytes, the B bytes, the K
bytes, the Z bytes, etc.  All of these are part of the OAM of the SONET/SDH
protocol.

For 10GbE, not all of the OAM bytes will be used within the interface
processing, thus reducing the cost of processing compared to current SONET/SDH
systems.  As far as proprietary implementations of external management systems,
have you ever heard of extended MIBs.  There is little difference in the
additional features offered by data switch vendors and the additional features
offered by transmission vendors.

Either you have been badly misinformed by some vendor somewhere, or do not
understand the overall issues of network management within the carrier
industry.  There are carrier (SONET) network management software solutions that
will span multiple vendors.  A major one of those vendors is in Calgary,
Canada.  It can be compared to the carrier version of the SNMP network managers
that are well known by the data networking industry.

The specific of the minimum OAM features that are implemented has not entered
the discuss yet.   I personally do not think that it is time yet.  Some of the
OAM features that are in SONET/SDH do not exist in common data networking
protocols, so many of the people that reading from this reflector are unfamiliar
with them.  To enter into that discussion now would very much confuse the
issues.

Thank you,
Roy Bynum
MCI WorldCom

"Bill St. Arnaud" wrote:

> Rohit:
>
> I think you will see 3 different approaches in the marketplace for
> delivering 10GbE over the WAN:
>
> 1. 10GbE over SONET where a proprietary OAM is done at SONET layer
> 2. 10Gbe over wavelengths where a proprietary OAM is done out of band in the
> optical channel
> 3. Native 10Gbe which would require some sort of new OAM protocol
>
> The question that has been asked as since no common standard has been
> developed for OAM in SONET, is a "standard" OAM required for native 10GbE?
>
> Bill
> >
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I recently subscribed to this list and was going through the archives
> >
> > Some people have mentioned about sending ethernet over MAN/WAN links.
> > The question I have is Ethernet doesn't have OAM features of SONET.
> > That is a critical feature for WANs (and not LANs)
> > How is that handled for 10GbE? Can you make intellegent enough DWDM
> > elements to handle that. Doesn't that by itself add overhead which is
> > comparable to SONET overhead. If so, then why is there so much
> > discussion
> > as to replace SONET by 10GbE.
>
> >
> > In packet over SONET, we use PPP which adds very little
> > overhead. Can't we use the same format for 10GbE over SONET. In that
> > case we can define the 10GbE standard without worrying about SONET .
> > Just my 2c.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Rohit Mittal
> > ~
> >