Ethernet Alliance White Papers


If you wish to contribute a white paper, please contact Angela Muscat, VP of Education by filling out the Ethernet Alliance contact form.



The IEEE P802.3ba 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s Ethernet Task Force has been working on the development of 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet. In October 2008, the Task Force took a major step forward, as it generated Draft 1.0 of the amendment to the IEEE Std 802.3™- 2008 Ethernet standard. The Task Force has developed a single architecture capable of supporting both 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, while producing physical layer specifications for communication across backplanes, copper cabling, multi-mode gigabit per second, and single-mode gigabit per second. This white paper provides an overview of the 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet project and the underlying technologies.
The Ethernet Alliance converged data center demonstration shows the deployment of several types of mixed traffic over a multi-vendor 10 GbE infrastructure with physical links that consist of both UTP copper, twinax copper and fiber optic media.  The SAN/LAN network is converged at Layer 2 using Ethernet as the common transport protocol. The demonstration data center runs 10 GbE application–to-application traffic, iSCSI storage and low latency traffic with a streaming video environment from iSCSI storage, FCoE over a lossless Ethernet network and converged traffic types via virtualized servers. The Ethernet Alliance demonstration shows a physical data center built with equipment from multiple vendors, switches, network interface card (NICs), converged network adapters (CNAs) and cabling systems that supports a complex yet realistic set of 10 GbE application environments.
Data Center Bridging
Networks are the essential part of any modern data center and they must deliver reliability, availability and high performance. Enterprises rely on their data centers to run business operations, service providers rely on their data centers to generate revenues by delivering network services, and content providers rely on their data centers to distribute revenue-producing content. Ethernet is the most widely deployed networking technology today. Currently, it fulfills increasingly demanding requirements for a variety of business needs. But can Ethernet technology evolve to help data centers improve costeffectiveness and meet the demands for next-generation services?

The wide adoption of 1G Ethernet passive optical networks (EPON) (per IEEE std P802.3ahTM) provided a significant jump in access network capacity and created demand for greater bandwidth-intensive applications and services such as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), Video-on-Demand (VoD) and high-grade internet protocol (IP) telephony known as Voice over IP (VoIP). To address these market demands, the IEEE P802.3av Task Force was created in September 2006 and its 10G-EPON draft builds upon the compatibility with the existing 1GEPON.


SFP+ Interoperability Demonstration White Paper (664 KB, pdf)

In April 2008, Ethernet Alliance members AMCC, Avago Technologies, Broadcom, ClariPhy, Cortina Systems, ExceLight Communications, Finisar, Gennum, Inphi, Intel, JDSU, MergeOptics, NetLogic Microsystems, Opnext and Vitesse successfully conducted multi-vendor interoperability testing of SFP+ 10GBASE-SR and 10GBASE-LR optical interfaces.  This white paper provides additional detail about the testing setup, procedure and test results

PAUSE Power Cycle: A New Backwards Compatible Method to reduce Energy Use of Ethernet Switches (374 KB, pdf)

Energy efficient Ethernet switches can provide significant global savings in electricity consumption.  In this white paper, a new backwards compatible method for achieving energy savings in Ethernet switches is designed, emulated, and evaluated.

Power Over Ethernet Plus (156 KB, pdf)

The standard for Power over Ethernet (PoE), IEEE Std. 802.3af™-2003, helped increase the value of an Ethernet port by

connecting and powering devices such as IP Phones using a common network infrastructure. Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE Plus) or IEEE P802.3at promises to deliver more power to enable a new breed of Ethernet devices and continue to support IEEE 802.3af.

Improving the Energy Efficiency of the Ethernet-Connected Devices: A Proposal for Proxying (477 KB, pdf)

September 2007: This new proxying capability will enable existing PC power management features to be much more utilized, and can do so without requiring changes to existing network applications.