Metro Ethernet Forum Announces QoS Certifications

The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) announced the first group of systems and services to comply with MEF 14 - Abstract Test Suite for Traffic Management. This MEF Certification ensures conformance to the MEF Quality of Service attributes - a requirement of SLAs (Service Level Agreements) supporting simultaneous real-time and data intensive business applications.



MEF 14, which is seen as a major step towards making Ethernet carrier-class, provides clear specifications-based guidelines for the formulation of SLAs. MEF 14 complements MEF 9 and covers two sets of MEF Service Attributes, namely "Service Performance" and "Bandwidth Profiles". The first set comprises three Service Performance attributes relating to the Ethernet Virtual Circuits (EVC): Frame delay, Frame delay variation and frame loss ratio. The second set, relating to the User Network Interface (UNI) and following the familiar example of Frame Relay, include four Bandwidth Profile attributes: CIR (Committed Information Rate), CBS (Committed Burst Size), EIR (Excess Information Rate), EBS (Excess Burst Size). Together MEF 9 and MEF 14 cover the complete set of Carrier Ethernet Service Attributes defined in the core definitional technical document MEF 10.

The first fourteen companies to be presented with certification for their respective systems today were: Actelis Networks, ADVA Optical Networking, Alcatel, Atrica, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, Fujitsu Communications, Hatteras Networks, Lucent Technologies, MRV, Siemens, Tellabs, T-pack and WorldWide Packets.

http://www.MetroEthernetForum.org