The Optical Internetworking Forum has started work on two new FlexE projects.
“The datacenter and communications industries are demanding a solution for flexible deployment and provisioning of Ethernet bandwidth,” said Scott Irwin of MoSys and the OIF’s Physical and Link Layer (PLL) Working Group protocol vice chair. “Building on its first generation of FlexE, the OIF has started a new project to support the next generation of Ethernet PHY rates currently under development within the IEEE 802.3 Working Group. Because of the large industry interest in FlexE, the OIF is also hosting a workshop on the topic which allows non-members to learn about the work first hand.”
The FlexE 1.0 implementation agreement, completed in March of this year, provides a mechanism to map one or more FlexE clients over a group of 100 Gb/s Ethernet PHYs. The client rates supported are 10G, 40G, and n×25G. The new FlexE 2.0 project will add the ability to create FlexE groups of 200 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s Ethernet PHYs and to consider several other feature additions.
FlexE 1.0 and ongoing revision enable 802.1 LLDP over management channels for FlexE Connectivity Verification. However, FlexE capabilities discovery is still required to facilitate the setup of FlexE Group(s) and Clients. The new FlexE Neighbor Discovery project will introduce some OIF organizational specific FlexE Extension to LLDP for FlexE capabilities discovery.
The OIF will host a workshop titled, FlexE Today and Tomorrow, in San Jose on January 20th.
http://www.oiforum.com/oif-announces-new-flex-ethernet-projects-and-workshop/
