Ethernet Services Transport Protocol with Configurable-QoS Attributes for Carrier Ethernet

Carrier-grade Ethernet has evolved greatly since its creation. Its simplicity, scalability, and inexpensiveness have made it an attractive technology for enterprises to interconnect their metro area networks (MANs). Today, Carrier Ethernet can span over 10,000 km. Ethernet Services were created to enable companies to distribute their own services through the carriergrade network. All the data that enters the Carrier Ethernet network (CEN) is policed by the CEN provider based on the service level agreement (SLA). Among the QoS attributes that are agreed upon is the packet loss rate (PLR) guarantee, committed information rate (CIR) and excess information rate (EIR). In this work we study the relation between PLR and throughput performance. This relationship can then be used to increase the throughput performance of the Ethernet Services transport protocol (ESTP). It achieves this by configuring an ESTP parameter that allows the CEN provider to increase the user’s throughput at the cost of PLR or vice versa. This increase is done while main maintaining the throughput above the CIR and below the EIR using only transport-layer algorithms.