Method, system, and apparatus for packet transmission

1. A packet aware (L2/L3) coherent optical transceiver comprising:

an ethernet data input MAC that feeds into a map;

a packet buffer, wherein the map maps data into the packet buffer; and

a packet parser with access to packet buffer and with logic enabled to:

parse incoming frames;

read priority information in headers of the frames;

classify the frames by information contained in headers of the frames; and

perform an action on the classification.

2. The optical transceiver of claim 1 wherein a first action is to drop a frame classified with a low priority.

3. The optical transceiver of claim 2 wherein the optical transceiver further comprises logic to communicate over an ethernet protocol.

4. The optical transceiver of claim 3 , wherein the optical transceiver has logic to insert a new ethernet packet into a data stream between the transceiver and a host.

5. The optical transceiver of claim 1 wherein the frame is a pause ethernet packet.

6. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver has a centrally buffered output queue to store data.

7. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the input and output bandwidth of the transceiver is enabled to be asymmetrical.

8. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver supports lossless transmission and loss-based transmission.

9. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver is packet aware.

10. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver operates in cut-through mode (low latency).

11. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the parsing and classification is according to an n-tuple classification.

12. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver is enabled to prioritize packets according to an n-tuple classification.

13. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver can police ethernet packets; wherein policing of the packets comprises dropping ethernet packets, blocking ethernet packets, and redirecting ethernet packets.

14. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver is enabled to mirror ethernet packets to a host interface port for further inspection based on transceiver bandwidth.

15. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver supports port-based priority flow control with a host; wherein port-based priority flow enables the transceiver to assign different priorities to each respective port enabling different data flow control for each port.

16. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver supports multiple output priority queues.

17. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver supports output queuing.

18. The optical transceiver of claim 1 , wherein the transceiver supports remote network monitoring (RMON).

19. A method performed by a packet aware (L2/L3) coherent optical transceiver, the method comprising:

receiving at an ethernet data input of the coherent optical transceiver MAC ethernet data input;

mapping the ethernet data input into a packet buffer;

parsing frames received by the coherent optical transceiver in the packet buffer;

reading priority information in headers of the frames; and

classifying the frames based on priority information contained in a header of the frame; and

performing an action based on the classification.

20. The optical transceiver of claim 1 wherein the action is load balancing.