This letter is a summary proposal for an evolution of the Ethernet transparent bridge paradigm that provides simple, shortest path bridging in campus networks. ARP-Path Ethernet Switches set up an on-demand path between two hosts just reusing and flooding the standard ARP request frame through all links and confirming the path reaching to the destination host with the ARP reply frame. ARP-Path uses the standard Ethernet frame format, is fully transparent to hosts and does not require spanning tree or link state protocol. Simulation results show superior performance to spanning tree and similar to shortest path routing, with lower complexity. Our implementations confirm backward compatibility, robustness and performance.

Roundabouts are a highway engineering concept meant to reduce congestion and improve safety. However, experience shows that capacity of roundabouts is limited, and safety is not optimal. However, these improvements in capacity and safety should be compatible with both manually-driven and autonomous vehicles. Incorporating existing advanced technologies to the signaling and control of roundabouts will undoubtedly contribute to these improvements but should not restrict this compatibility. We approach roundabouts as synchronous switches of vehicles, and propose a roundabout system (synchronous roundabouts with rotating priorities) based on vehicle platoons arriving at the roundabout at a uniform speed and within the time slot assigned to their entry, avoiding conflicts and stops. The proposed signaling system is visual for human drivers and wireless for connected and autonomous vehicles. We evaluated analytically and with simulations roundabouts of different radii for several values of the average distance between vehicles. Results show that average delays are 28.7% lower, with negligible dispersion. The capacity improvements depend on design parameters, moderate for small roundabouts, but that goes up to 70–100% for short inter vehicular distances and medium and large roundabouts. Simulations with unbalanced traffic maintained the capacity improvement over standard roundabouts.

Tree-based Routing (TRE) revisits Tree-based Routing Architecture for Irregular Networks (TRAIN)-a forwarding scheme based on a spanning tree that was extended to use some shortcut links.We propose its adaptation to Ethernet, using a new type of hierarchical Ethernet addresses and a procedure to assign them to bridges. We show that compared to RSTP, TRE offers improved throughput. The impact of transient loops in TRE is lower compared to the application of the classical shortest path routing protocols to Ethernet. Finally, TRE is self-configuring and its forwarding process is simpler and more efficient than in standard Ethernet and shortest path routing proposals.

Ethernet switched networks do not scale appropriately due to limitations inherent to the spanning tree protocol. Ethernet architectures based on routing over a virtual topology in which turns are prohibited offer improved performance over spanning tree, although in some cases suffer from excessive computational complexity. Up/Down routing is a turn prohibition algorithm with low computational complexity. In this paper we propose HURBA, a new layer-two architecture that improves Up/Down routing performance due to an optimization based on the use of hierarchical addressing, while preserving the computational complexity of Up/Down. The resulting architecture requires zero-configuration, uses the same frame format as Ethernet, allows upgrades by software update, and is compatible with 802.1D bridges by means of encapsulation. HURP protocol builds automatically a core with the interconnected HURP routing bridges and the standard bridges get connected to the edges in standard spanning trees. Simulations show that the performance of HURP, evaluated over various combinations of network topology and size, is close to the one of shortest path, is consistently better than that of Up/Down, and is equal or better than Turn Prohibition, with the advantage of having a lower complexity.En prens

In this paper we propose Fast Path Ethernet, an evolution of the transparent bridges learning mechanisms to increase infrastructure utilization for campus and datacenter networks in a simple way. Fast Path Ethernet Switches reuse standard ARP Request and Reply packets to set up fast on-demand paths between hosts. This architecture uses the standard Ethernet frame format, so it is fully transparent to hosts and compatible with 802.1D bridging in core-island mode. A proof of concept has been implemented in Linux. Preliminary simulations in metropolitan and campus network topologies show superior performance to spanning tree and even to shortest path forwarding, at a fraction of the their complexity.