Carriers, equipment vendors and businesses shopping for connectivity can now speak the same language when it comes to discussing Ethernet services thanks to a new document from the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). MEF 1.0, which the forum says is the industry’s first Ethernet service standard, defines the building blocks used to create Ethernet services.
MEF 1.0, also known as the Ethernet service model (ESM), defines common parameters and attributes for Ethernet user network interface (UNI) and Ethernet virtual circuit (EVC). For example, the standard discusses such UNI attributes as port speed; whether a port can support multiple services; and the bandwidth profile for the UNI, explains Ralph Santitoro, co-chair of MEF’s marketing committee and director of network architecture at Nortel Networks. On the EVC side, he adds, the MEF 1.0 document outlines service attributes such as whether the connection is point-to-point or multipoint-to-multipoint; whether a customer’s class of service is preserved in the Ethernet header; and whether a customer’s virtual LAN ID is preserved.
MEF 1.0 is just the first of three technical specifications in what the MEF describes as phase one of its service documents. The next document the forum is working on discusses how to apply the ESM building blocks to create services and defines Ethernet line and Ethernet LAN service types. Ethernet Services Definitions, as this second spec is known, will likely be ratified by the MEF this quarter, says Santitoro.
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Probably more significant yet will be a third technical specification called Ethernet Traffic Management (ETM), which the MEF hopes to ratify in the second quarter. “Today, traffic management for Ethernet is not defined anywhere,” says Santitoro. “Many Ethernet services today don’t offer any QoS. Many large enterprise customers that want to use Ethernet demand QoS, so they’re now using private line, ATM and frame relay.”
ETM will address such traffic-management issues as how to define jitter, delay and packet loss in a consistent way, he says.
Nav Chander, a vice president for MEF and cochair for MEF’s marketing committee and director of product marketing at Coriolis Networks, says the traffic management standard will be “a huge benefit” to service providers by offering a common language for defining multipoint-to-multipoint services such as voice and multimedia for which Ethernet is the ideal transport. “The challenge, of course, is that the industry doesn’t have these definitions,” says Chander. “Those definitions are not easy to implement. It will help accelerate new types of Ethernet services.”
