The Evolution of Ethernet: Research Issues and Non-Issues

              Mart Molle

  Department of Computer Science and Engineering
        University of California
         Riverside, CA 92521


     SF1105, 11am November 3, 1998

Although Ethernet is more than 25 years old, it is more
successful today than ever before.  The reason for its
success is that the Ethernet standard has been continuously
evolving to incorporate new technology such as new media
and physical layer encoding schemes, higher data rates,
and new network architectural paradigms.  In this talk, I
will discuss several of these changes which I have been
personally involved in, including modifications to the
CSMA/CD medium access control protocol and Gigabit Ethernet.
In each case, I will describe the technical issues motivating
the change, the set of possible solutions that were considered,
and which one(s) were ultimately successful and why.  In
addition, I will describe some important open research problems
in the areas of flow control, parallel transmission, and the
provision of improved quality of service.