Frame relay Networks

Frame Relay often is described as a streamlined version of X.25, offering fewer of the robust capabilities, such as windowing and retransmission of last data that are offered in X.25.

Frame Relay Devices

Devices attached to a Frame Relay WAN fall into the following two general categories:

• Data terminal equipment (DTE) • Data circuit-terminating equipment (DCE)

DTEs generally are considered to be terminating equipment for a specific network and typically are located on the premises of a customer. In fact, they may be owned by the customer. Examples of DTE devices are terminals, personal computers, routers, and bridges.

DCEs are carrier-owned internetworking devices. The purpose of DCE equipment is to provide clocking and switching services in a network, which are the devices that actually transmit data through the WAN. In most cases, these are packet switches. Figure 10-1 shows the relationship between the two categories of devices.

Standard Frame Relay Frame

Standard Frame Relay frames consist of the fields illustrated in Figure 10-4.

Figure Five Fields Comprise the Frame Relay Frame

Each frame relay PDU consists of the following fields:

Flag Field. The flag is used to perform high level data link synchronization which indicates the beginning and end of the frame with the unique pattern 01111110. To ensure that the 01111110 pattern does not appear somewhere inside the frame, bit stuffing and destuffing procedures are used.
Address Field. Each address field may occupy either octet 2 to 3, octet 2 to 4, or octet 2 to 5, depending on the range of the address in use. A two-octet address field comprising the EA=ADDRESS FIELD EXTENSION BITS and the C/R=COMMAND/RESPONSE BIT.
DLCI-Data Link Connection Identifier Bits. The DLCI serves to identify the virtual connection so that the receiving end knows which information connection a frame belongs to. Note that this DLCI has only local significance. A single physical channel can multiplex several different virtual connections.
FECN, BECN, DE bits. These bits report congestion:
- FECN=Forward Explicit Congestion Notification bit
- BECN=Backward Explicit Congestion Notification bit
- DE=Discard Eligibility bit
Information Field. A system parameter defines the maximum number of data bytes that a host can pack into a frame. Hosts may negotiate the actual maximum frame length at call set-up time. The standard specifies the maximum information field size (supportable by any network) as at least 262 octets. Since end-to-end protocols typically operate on the basis of larger information units, frame relay recommends that the network support the maximum value of at least 1600 octets in order to avoid the need for segmentation and reassembling by end-users.

Frame Check Sequence (FCS) Field. Since one cannot completely ignore the bit error-rate of the medium, each switching node needs to implement error detection to avoid wasting bandwidth due to the transmission of erred frames. The error detection mechanism used in frame relay uses the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) as its basis.

Congestion-Control Mechanisms

Frame Relay reduces network overhead by implementing simple congestion-notification mechanisms rather than explicit, per-virtual-circuit flow control. Frame Relay typically is implemented on reliable network media, so data integrity is not sacrificed because flow control can be left to higher-layer protocols. Frame Relay implements two congestion-notification mechanisms:

• Forward-explicit congestion notification (FECN)

• Backward-explicit congestion notification (BECN) FECN and BECN each is controlled by a single bit contained in the Frame Relay frame header. The Frame Relay frame header also contains a Discard Eligibility (DE) bit, which is used to identify less important traffic that can be dropped during periods of congestion.

Frame Relay versus X.25

The design of X.25 aimed to provide error-free delivery over links with high error-rates. Frame relay takes advantage of the new links with lower error-rates, enabling it to eliminate many of the services provided by X.25. The elimination of functions and fields, combined with digital links, enables frame relay to operate at speeds 20 times greater than X.25.

X.25 specifies processing at layers 1, 2 and 3 of the OSI model, while frame relay operates at layers 1 and 2 only. This means that frame relay has significantly less processing to do at each node, which improves throughput by an order of magnitude.

X.25 prepares and sends packets, while frame relay prepares and sends frames. X.25 packets contain several fields used for error and flow control, none of which frame relay needs. The frames in frame relay contain an expanded address field that enables frame relay nodes to direct frames to their destinations with minimal processing .

X.25 has a fixed bandwidth available. It uses or wastes portions of its bandwidth as the load dictates. Frame relay can dynamically allocate bandwidth during call setup negotiation at both the physical and logical channel level.