Service overlays for Ethernet LAN over SONET/SDH

Next-generation SONET/SDH provides carriers with new capabilities for building advanced Ethernet data services. Along these lines, numerous Ethernet-over-SONET studies have been done, with most focusing on point-to-point private line type services. This paper introduces the more challenging problem of provisioning multi-point-to-multi-point Ethernet LAN services over inverse-multiplexing networks and proposes novel overlay strategies based upon star, bus, and minimum spanning tree topologies. Multi-tiered protection schemes are also developed to help set up these respective overlay designs. Detailed simulation results are then presented along with directions for future work.