6533b85dfe1ef96bd12bf0b6

RESEARCH PRODUCT

ZERO: An Efficient Ethernet-Over-IP Tunneling Protocol

subject

description

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 classifies 99.94 % of Ethernet frames as NICE and thus results in nearly zero-overhead, non-fragmented Ethernet over IP tunneling. The proposed tunneling method extends also to the Ethernet frames containing VLAN and MPLS tags, as well as IPv6 packets—also these can be classified as NICE and transported with zero-overhead over Internet or private IPv4 transport network. Unprecedented efficiency of the proposed tunneling protocol enables wide use of OSI Layer 2 transparency across existing Layer 3 infrastructures thus enabling new network design patterns essential for novel applications such as Internet of things.