Carrier Ethernet Industry Voices

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Ethernet services have been increasingly deployed by carriers over the last few years. The most successful so far are E-Line (point-to-point) and E-LAN (multipoint-to-multipoint) services. To achieve carrier grade objectives, such deployments have been done over MPLS backbones. Recently though, carriers have seen the need for deploying a new type of Ethernet services called "E-Tree" over their infrastructure. This type of services is expected to complement the range of Ethernet products offered by carriers today with new possibilities and new applications, specifically in the distribution of content (typically video), mobile backhaul and clock synchronisation to only mention a few. However, with any new type of services, new challenges also appear in relation to operational deployment.

This article highlights the different use cases and potential benefits of deploying E-Tree services over an MPLS backbone. It also presents some of the short term and long term challenges facing such deployments and some of the elements currently under development in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to address these specific challenges.

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