QoS in Ethernet Access Ring

Overview

Ethernet is being extended to Metro Area Networks (MAN) mainly due to its simplicity and low cost. However Ethernet protocols need extensions to succeed as MAN technology in terms of scalability, Quality of Service (QoS), resiliency and Operations, Administration and Maintenance. The QoS mechanism existing in Ethernet is localized to each node and affected by the spatial properties. Hence in order to enhance the QoS level in Ethernet, a distributed QoS mechanism is required which ensures fairness and bandwidth guarantees. The paper proposes one such approach for Ethernet Access Ring in this paper. The mechanism ensures global fairness in the access ring that gives every node in the ring a fair share of the ring bandwidth.