Infineon Technologies is developing devices incorporating OC-192 Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) technology.
This technology is currently being standardised in the IEEE 802.17 committee that will extend Gigabit Ethernet into Metropolitan and Wide Area Networks, paving the way for Gigabit Ethernet metro services.
The new devices will augment Infineon's recently-announced 40Gbit/s high-speed framing, mapping, and mux/demux line card solutions, that the company claims are leading this sector.
Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) is gaining rapid momentum within the industry and will play a critical role in offering service providers the ability to create high-speed metropolitan networks that transport voice and data traffic efficiently while lowering both capital expense as well as ongoing operational expenses.
RPR, a Layer 2 media access control technology, significantly increases the bandwidth efficiency of service provider networks by utilising twice the capacity of traditional SONET/SDH rings.
It also delivers dynamic bandwidth management while preserving the same kind of protection and resiliency found in SONET/SDH networks.
In an effort to accelerate industry availability of RPR products, Infineon is licensing Cisco's widely deployed Spatial Reuse Protocol (SRP), a technology now used by around 190 service providers worldwide.
SRP is a MAC-layer protocol for ring-based packet internetworking and is open and freely available as IETF Informational RFC 2892.
Additionally, SRP has been submitted to the IEEE 802.17 Working Group.
Cisco uses SRP in its Dynamic Packet Transport (DPT) products to deliver scalability, reliability, and simplicity to next-generation packet-based metro networks.