7.2.2 This page will describe 1000BASE-T.
As Fast Ethernet was installed to increase bandwidth to workstations, this began to create bottlenecks upstream in the network. The 1000BASE-T standard, which is IEEE 802.3ab, was developed to provide additional bandwidth to help alleviate these bottlenecks. It provided more throughput for devices such as intra-building backbones, inter-switch links, server farms, and other wiring closet applications as well as connections for high-end workstations. Fast Ethernet was designed to function over Category 5 copper cable that passes the Category 5e test. Most installed Category 5 cable can pass the Category 5e certification if properly terminated. It is important for the 1000BASE-T standard to be interoperable with 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX.
Since Category 5e cable can reliably carry up to 125 Mbps of traffic, 1000 Mbps or 1 Gigabit of bandwidth was a design challenge. The first step to accomplish 1000BASE-T is to use all four pairs of wires instead of the traditional two pairs of wires used by 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX. This requires complex circuitry that allows full-duplex transmissions on the same wire pair. This provides 250 Mbps per pair. With all four-wire pairs, this provides the desired 1000 Mbps. Since the information travels simultaneously across the four paths, the circuitry has to divide frames at the transmitter and reassemble them at the receiver.
The 1000BASE-T encoding with 4D-PAM5 line encoding is used on Category 5e, or better, UTP. That means the transmission and reception of data happens in both directions on the same wire at the same time. As might be expected, this results in a permanent collision on the wire pairs. These collisions result in complex voltage patterns. With the complex integrated circuits using techniques such as echo cancellation, Layer 1 Forward Error Correction (FEC), and prudent selection of voltage levels, the system achieves the 1-Gigabit throughput.
In idle periods there are nine voltage levels found on the cable, and during data transmission periods there are 17 voltage levels found on the cable. With this large number of states and the effects of noise, the signal on the wire looks more analog than digital. Like analog, the system is more susceptible to noise due to cable and termination problems.
The data from the sending station is carefully divided into four parallel streams, encoded, transmitted and detected in parallel, and then reassembled into one received bit stream. Figure represents the simultaneous full duplex on four-wire pairs. 1000BASE-T supports both half-duplex as well as full-duplex operation. The use of full-duplex 1000BASE-T is widespread.
The next page will introduce 1000BASE-SX and LX
7.2.3 This page will discuss single-mode and multimode optical fiber.
The IEEE 802.3 standard recommends that Gigabit Ethernet over fiber be the preferred backbone technology.
The timing, frame format, and transmission are common to all versions of 1000 Mbps. Two signal-encoding schemes are defined at the physical layer. The 8B/10B scheme is used for optical fiber and shielded copper media, and the pulse amplitude modulation 5 (PAM5) is used for UTP.
1000BASE-X uses 8B/10B encoding converted to non-return to zero (NRZ) line encoding. NRZ encoding relies on the signal level found in the timing window to determine the binary value for that bit period. Unlike most of the other encoding schemes described, this encoding system is level driven instead of edge driven. That is the determination of whether a bit is a zero or a one is made by the level of the signal rather than when the signal changes levels.
The NRZ signals are then pulsed into the fiber using either short-wavelength or long-wavelength light sources. The short-wavelength uses an 850 nm laser or LED source in multimode optical fiber (1000BASE-SX). It is the lower-cost of the options but has shorter distances. The long-wavelength 1310 nm laser source uses either single-mode or multimode optical fiber (1000BASE-LX). Laser sources used with single-mode fiber can achieve distances of up to 5000 meters. Because of the length of time to completely turn the LED or laser on and off each time, the light is pulsed using low and high power. A logic zero is represented by low power, and a logic one by high power.
The Media Access Control method treats the link as point-to-point. Since separate fibers are used for transmitting (Tx) and receiving (Rx) the connection is inherently full duplex. Gigabit Ethernet permits only a single repeater between two stations. Figure is a 1000BASE Ethernet media comparison chart.
The next page describes the architecture of Gigabit Ethernet
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