Essay About Gigabit Ethernet And 100Base-Tx Cat

Gigabit Ethernet and Expanding Network Environments
Gigabit Ethernet and Expanding Network Environments
Gigabit Ethernet
Expanding Network Environments
Table of Contents
Ethernet Background 1
Technical Description 2
Gig-E and Network Environments 3
Physical Media and Growing Ranges 3
Media Access Protocols and Changing Traffic Patterns 4
Synchronous Optical Network vs. Gigabit Ethernet 5
SONet, the Incumbent 6
The Costs of Networking 6
System Performance 9
Long Haul Shortcomings 10
Gigabit Ethernet As an End-to-End Solution 11
Local Area Network Deployment 11
Metro Area Network Deployment and Beyond 12
Works Cited 14
Ethernet Background
Nearly thirty years ago, Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs, and a team of Xerox researchers
began developing a means of interconnecting graphical computers at their Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC) in California (10GigE Technology, 9/01). Envisioned as a way for computers
within a single building or campus to share data among each other, this technology soon became
known as the Ethernet, so named because it created a network of computers seemingly
interconnected through the “ether.” While the coaxial cable design was relatively simplistic, the
idea of interconnecting computers within a network architecture was nevertheless powerful and,
over time, attracted the attention of several influential companies, including Xerox, Intel, and
Digital Equipment Corporation. During the early 1980s, these companies formed a consortium
to promote the technology as a local area network (LAN) implementation that delivered
relatively high performance at a minimal cost (GigE Equipment, 2001). Around the same time,
Ethernet gained additional substantiation when the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) announced the 802.3 standard for the technology.
Since that time, Ethernet technology and its associated 802.3 standards have evolved
substantially (Table 1).
With the introduction of
different physical media,
topologies, ranges, and
speeds, Ethernet has
gained significant improvements in functionality and has expanded its network scope beyond the
original local area environment. In fact, the newest versions of the technolo gy, Gigabit Ethernet
and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, are now attempting to expand into the larger scale network markets of
Configuration Medium Max Length (m) IEEE Standard
10Base-T Cat 3/4 TP 802.3i
100Base-TX Cat 5 TP 802.3u
1000Base-SX Short l MM Fiber 550 (new) / 220 (old) 802.3z
1000Base-LX Long l MM Fiber 550 802.3z
1000Base-LX Long l SM Fiber 5000 802.3z
1000Base-CX Cat 5e STP 25 802.3z
1000Base-T 4-pair Cat 5e UTP 100 802.3ab
10Gbase-LX? MM Fiber 350+ 802.3ae
10GBase-LX? SM Fiber 40,000+ 802.3ae
Table 1 – Ethernet Choices
Metro Area Networks (MAN) and Wide Area Networks (WAN). With corporate backing from
industry leaders like 3Com, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Intel, Nortel, and Sun
Microsystems, Gigabit Ethernet, or Gig- E, as it has come to be called, promises levels of
operability to successfully compete with legacy