ZERO: An Efficient Ethernet-Over-IP Tunneling Protocol

An Ethernet over IPv4 tunneling protocol is proposed, which categorizes all Ethernet frames to be tunneled into NICE and UGLY frames. The UGLY frames are tunneled by traditional methods, such as UDP or GRE encapsulation, resulting in substantial overhead due to additional headers and fragmentation usually required to transport long Ethernet frames over IP network typically limited to MTU=1,500 bytes. Meanwhile the NICE Ethernet frames are tunneled without any overhead as plain IPv4 packets due to non-traditional reuse of “fragment offset” or “identification” field in the IP header. It is shown that for typical Internet traffic transported over Ethernet, the proposed ZERO tunneling protocol …