Test Areas and Demos

EANTC developed a test plan together with participating vendors focused on the following test areas:

• Carrier Ethernet Transport and Access - Ethernet services were established over three leading transport technologies: MPLS, PBB-TE (Provider Backbone Bridge Traffic Engineering), and T-MPLS.  These different technology domains were inter-connected to provide instances of all three MEF defined service types: E-Line, E-LAN, and for the first time in a Carrier Ethernet interoperability event: E-Tree.  Access to emulated customer sites included Ethernet over copper, fiber, SHDSL, and microwave.
  
  
• Mobile Backhaul - While the industry is shifting towards packet oriented networks to support Mobile Backhaul, much of the currently installed mobile equipment is using legacy technologies based on ATM and TDM. The migration path, therefore, naturally includes Circuit Emulation Services (CES) and ATM emulation.  Two variations of Circuit Emulation Services were tested - TDM over Ethernet (MEF 8) and TDM over packet (RFC 4553), in addition to ATM transport over MPLS (RFC 4714).
  
  
• Clock Synchronization - The final and crucial component to mobile backhaul is the synchronization of clocks for which we tested both IEEE 1588v2 and adaptive clocking scenarios.
  
  
• Ethernet OAM - Great progress has been made in the area of Ethernet OAM as shown by our tests which were categorized into three areas: Service OAM (Connectivity Fault Management from IEEE 802.1ag), Link OAM (Ethernet in the First Mile from IEEE 802.3ah) and Performance Monitoring (ITU-T Y.1731).
  
  
• Resiliency - In order to deliver reliable Ethernet services, the network must maintain a certain level of resilience.  For this, several technologies were tested for their fail-over capabilities.  The MPLS network tested BFD, Fast Reroute, and dual homed MTU switches, while the PBB-TE network tested protection using CFM and the T-MPLS network tested 1:1 as well as 1+1 protection as defined by the ITU-T, and PBB-TE showcased protection using CFM. Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) was tested in accordance to the MEF's UNI type 2.2 redundancy requirement.
  
  
• Management - Management systems were tested for their ability to observe protocol control plain behavior, visualize the topology, and do Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring of performance on devices from several different vendors.