Frame relay

In the context of computer networking, frame relay (also found written as "frame-relay") consists of an efficient data transmission technique used to send digital information quickly and cheaply in a relay of frames to one or many destinations from one or many end-points. Network providers commonly implement frame relay for voice and data as an encapsulation technique, used between local area networks (LANs) over a wide area network (WAN). Each end-user gets a private line (or leased line) to a frame-relay node. The frame-relay network handles the transmission over a frequently-changing path transparent to all end-users.

As of 2006 native IP-based networks have gradually begun to displace frame relay. With the advent of MPLS, VPN and dedicated broadband services such as cable modem and DSL, the end may loom for the frame relay protocol and encapsulation. There remain, however, many rural areas lacking DSL and cable modem services, and in such cases the least expensive type of "always-on" connection remains a 128-kilobit frame-relay line. Thus a retail chain, for instance, may use frame relay for connecting rural stores into their corporate WAN.

Frame Relay description

The designers of frame relay aimed at a telecommunication service for cost-efficient data transmission for intermittent traffic between local area networks (LANs) and between end-points in a wide area network (WAN). Frame relay puts data in variable-size units called "frames" and leaves any necessary error-correction (such as re-transmission of data) up to the end-points. This speeds up overall data transmission. For most services, the network provides a permanent virtual circuit (PVC), which means that the customer sees a continuous, dedicated connection without having to pay for a full-time leased line, while the service-provider figures out the route each frame travels to its destination and can charge based on usage.

An enterprise can select a level of service quality - prioritizing some frames and making others less important. A number of service providers, including AT&T, offer frame relay. Frame relay can run on fractional T-1 or full T-carrier system carriers. Frame relay complements and provides a mid-range service between ISDN, which offers bandwidth at 128 kbit/s, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), which operates in somewhat similar fashion to frame relay but at speeds from 155.520 Mbit/s to 622.080 Mbit/s.

Frame relay has its technical base in the older X.25 packet-switching, designed for transmitting analog data such as voice conversations. Unlike X.25, whose designers expected analog signals, frame relay offers a fast packet technology, which means that the protocol does not attempt to correct errors. When a frame relay network detects an error in a frame, it simply "drops" that frame. The end points have the responsibility for detecting and retransmitting dropped frames. (However, digital networks offer an incidence of error extraordinarily small relative to that of analog networks.)

Frame relay often serves to connect local area networks (LANs) with major backbones as well as on public wide-area networks (WANs) and also in private network environments with leased lines over T-1 lines. It requires a dedicated connection during the transmission period. Frame relay does not provide an ideal path for voice or video transmission, both of which require a steady flow of transmissions. However, under certain circumstances, voice and video transmission do use frame relay.

Frame relay relays packets at the data link layer (layer 2) of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model rather than at the network layer (layer 3). A frame can incorporate packets from different protocols such as Ethernet and X.25. It varies in size up to a thousand bytes or more.

Frame Relay originated as an extension of Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN). Its designers aimed to enable a packet-switched network to transport the circuit-switched technology. The technology has become a stand-alone and cost-effective means of creating a WAN.

Frame Relay switches create virtual circuits to connect remote LANs to a WAN. The Frame Relay network exists between a LAN border device, usually a router, and the carrier switch. The technology used by the carrier to transport the data between the switches is not important to Frame Relay.

The sophistication of the technology requires a thorough understanding of the terms used to describe how Frame Relay works. Without a firm understanding of Frame Relay, it is difficult to troubleshoot its performance.

Frame Relay has become one of the most extensively-used WAN protocols. Its cheapness (compared to leased lines) provided one reason for its popularity. The extreme simplicity of configuring user equipment in a Frame Relay network offers another reason for Frame Relay's popularity.

Frame-relay frame structure essentially mirrors almost exactly that defined for LAP-D. Traffic analysis can distinguish frame relay format from LAP-D by its lack of a control field.

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.

The frame relay network uses a simplified protocol at each switching node. It achieves simplicity by omitting link-by-link flow-control. As a result, the offered load has largely determined the performance of frame relay networks. In the case of high offered load is high, due to the bursts in some services, temporary overload at some frame relay nodes causes a collapse in network throughput. Therefore, frame-relay networks require some effective mechanisms to control the congestion.

Congestion control in frame-relay networks includes the following elements:

Admission Control. This provides the principle mechanism used in frame relay to ensure the guarantee of resource requirement once accepted. It also serves generally to achieve high network performance. The network decides whether to accept a new connection-request, based on the relation of the requested traffic-descriptor and the network's residual capacity. The traffic descriptor consists of a set of parameters communicated to the switching nodes at call set-up time or at service-subscription time, and which characterizes the connection's statistical properties. The traffic descriptor consists of three elements:
Committed Information Rate (CIR). The average rate (in bit/s) at which the network guarantees to transfer information units over a measurement interval T. This T interval is defined as: T = Bc/CIR .
Committed Burst Size (BC). The maximum number of information units transmittable during the interval T.
Excess Burst Size (BE). The maximum number of uncommitted information units (in bits) that the network will attempt to carry during the interval

Once the network has established a connection, the edge node of the frame relay network must monitor the connection's traffic flow to ensure that the actual usage of network resources does not exceed this specification. Frame relay defines some restrictions on the user's information rate. It allows the network to enforce the end user's information rate and discard information when the subscribed access rate is exceeded.

Explicit congestion notification is proposed as the congestion avoidance policy. It tries to keep the network operating at its desired equilibrium point so that a certain QOS for the network can be met. To do so, special congestion control bits have been incorporated into the address field of the frame relay: FECN and BECN. The basic idea is to avoid data accumulation inside the network. FECN means Forward Explicit Congestion Notification. FECN bit can be set to 1 to indicate that congestion was experienced in the direction of the frame transmission, so it informs the destination that congestion has occurred. BECN means Backwards Explicit Congestion Notification. BECN bit can be set to 1 to indicate that congestion was experienced in the network in the direction opposite of the frame transmission, so it informs the sender that congestion has occurred.

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.

Virtual circuits

As a WAN protocol, frame relay is most commonly implemented at Layer 2 (data link layer) of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) seven layer model. Two types of circuits exist: permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) which are used to form logical end-to-end links mapped over a physical network, and switched virtual circuits (SVCs). The latter analogous to the circuit-switching concepts of the public-switched telephone network (or PSTN), the global phone network we are most familiar with today. While SVCs exist and are part of the frame relay specification, they are rarely applied to real-world scenarios. SVCs are most often considered harder to configure and maintain and are generally avoided without appropriate justification.

X.25 origins

Frame relay began as a stripped-down version of the X.25 protocol, releasing itself from the error-correcting burden most commonly associated with X.25. When frame relay detects an error, it simply drops the offending packet. Frame relay uses the concept of shared-access and relies on a technique referred to as "best-effort", whereby error-correction practically does not exist and practically no guarantee of reliable data delivery occurs. Frame relay provides an industry-standard encapsulation utilizing the strengths of high-speed, packet-switched technology able to service multiple virtual circuits and protocols between connected devices, such as two routers.

Local Management Interface (LMI)

Initial proposals for Frame Relay were presented to the Consultative Committee on International Telephone and Telegraph (CCITT) in 1984. Lack of interoperability and standardisation, prevented any significant Frame Relay deployment until 1990 when Cisco, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Northern Telecom, and StrataCom formed a consortium to focus on its development. They produced a protocol that provided additional capabilities for complex inter-networking environments. These Frame Relay extensions are referred to as the Local Management Interface (LMI).

Datalink Connection Identifiers (or DLCIs) are numbers that refer to paths through the frame relay network. They are only locally significant, which means that when device-A sends data to device-B it will most-likely use a different DLCI than device-B would use to reply. Multiple virtual circuits can be active on the same physical end-points (performed by using subinterfaces).

Committed Information Rate (CIR)

Frame relay connections are often given a Committed Information Rate (CIR) and an allowance of burstable bandwidth known as the Extended Information Rate (EIR). The provider guarantees that the connection will always support the CIR rate, and sometimes the EIR rate should there be adequate bandwidth. Frames that are sent in excess of the CIR are marked as "discard eligible" (DE) which means they can be dropped should congestion occur within the frame relay network. Frames sent in excess of the EIR are dropped immediately.

Market reputation

Frame relay aimed to make more efficient use of existing physical resources, which allow for the underprovisioning of data services by telecommunications companies (telcos) to their customers, as most clients were unlikely to be utilizing a data service 100 percent of the time. In more recent years, frame relay has acquired a bad reputation in some markets because of excessive bandwidth overbooking by these telcos.

Telcos often sell frame relay to businesses looking for a cheaper alternative to dedicated lines; its use in different geographic areas depended greatly on governmental and telecommunication companies' policies. Some of the early companies to make frame relay products included StrataCom (later acquired by Cisco Systems) and Cascade Communications (later acquired by Ascend Communications and then by Lucent Technologies).

External links

The MFA Forum (MPLS, Frame Relay, and ATM)
Cisco Technology Documentation
RFC 1973 - PPP in Frame Relay
RFC 2427 - Multiprotocol Interconnect over Frame Relay
Frame Relay Directory and Informational Resource

Network protocols

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