Cost-Effective and Practical Implementation of the Gigabit Ethernet for Home and Small-Business Applications

摘要

Electronic commerce, multimedia entertainment, on-line education, and similar applications have pushed the need for adapting high-speed gigabit Ethernet (GE), even for homes and small businesses. There is considerable confusion and concern about updating the conventional 10 or 100 Megabit Ethernet to GE, especially in terms of cost, performance, and compatibility with the existing networking modules. There is abundance of literature on GE products and services, which often leads to more confusion in the minds of the home and small-business owners rather than helps them. Also, there are no clear guidelines as how to assess the improvement in terms of reliability, security, performance, and cost-effectiveness, when GE is adapted, in place of the conventional Ethernet. In this article, the authors will present the important issues of migration into the GE environment and discuss the cost-performance issues. Also, the authors will provide some practical implementation methodologies based upon the simulation results of GE. Some invisible factors that affect the performance of GE are latency or delay and point-to-point and multipoint traffic flow. These issues are currently being studied at the VLSI and Networking Laboratories at Florida International University. The authors will also provide the results of these investigations. The authors would like to thank Mr. Magno Guillen for helping them in the OPNET simulations.