Ethernet Operation Administration and Maintenance ; Opportunities for the NREN community

Ethernet started its life as a Local Area Network technology and initially did not have Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) features like IP Ping, IP Traceroute and SDH Loss of Frame.
Monitoring and management was mainly done on the IP level. In the case of delivery of Ethernet connections or services IP OAM traffic could follow a completely different path through the networks than the end user traffic going through the Ethernet connection or service. This is clearly not desirable if end-to-end connections or services have to be monitored through the network. Fortunately, in the last years several standardization bodies like IEEE, ITU and MEF have extended Ethernet with carrier grade OAM features which address the aforementioned issue. With the increasing penetration of Ethernet based services worldwide including the NREN
community, these OAM features could prove extremely beneficial in terms of diagnosing the network, monitoring services and verifying their performance end-to-end. This paper shortly describes several Ethernet OAM mechanisms and considers several useful intra- and inter-NREN network deployment scenarios of these mechanisms. Ethernet OAM seems the homogeneous technology of choice to use in multi NREN domain Ethernet service delivery monitoring. The value of the use of Ethernet OAM in single domain Ethernet service
monitoring is highly dependant on the dominant Ethernet transport technology used in the NREN domain. The results of this paper can be used as a starting point when planning to deploy monitoring for Ethernet services in a single and multi domain environment.