Implementing a preamble OA&M channel in a 10 gigabit per second ethernet IC

For this project, I led a team to implement a proposed OAM (Operation, Administration & Maintenance) protocol layer for a 10GE Physical Layer IC (Integrated Circuit). This report gives background of the protocols and technologies involved, and the history of the OAM proposal. It also describes my work to implement the proposal. The proposed OAM protocol makes use of the eight-byte preamble on every Ethernet packet which is not needed for full duplex Ethernet links. Although the IEEE 802.3 working group ultimately rejected this protocol, it is a technically superior approach, and was interesting to implement.