System and Method for Enabling Energy Efficiency Over Ethernet Links in Consideration of Optical Network Transport Equipment

摘要

A system and method for enabling energy efficiency over Ethernet links in consideration of optical transport network (OTN) equipment. It is a feature of the present invention that a secondary startup condition can be provided whereby the energy efficiency Ethernet operation in a link partner is conditionally enabled upon a transmission by the link partner of an initiation signal (e.g., reserved or unused code group) that would be semi-acceptable to a legacy physical coding sublayer (PCS) in OTN equipment and a receipt by the link partner of valid energy efficient Ethernet signaling.