Resilient Packet Ring working group reaches agreement on metro services support

The Resilient Packet Ring Alliance, an industry advocacy group promoting the standardization of resilient packet ring (RPR) technology, has announced major areas of agreement on the draft RPR standard following last week's IEEE 802.17 Working Group meeting in Austin, Texas. The Working Group made significant strides toward an RPR standard by agreeing on an outline and initial text for the draft standard. The group also reached consensus on the need for an RPR draft that accommodates multiple carrier services including circuit-emulated services, service-level agreements for private line services, and best-effort Internet access.

"At this meeting, the RPR Working Group made considerable progress and gained wide agreement on our goal of a single draft standard," contends Robert Love, chair of the RPR Alliance and vice chair of the IEEE 802.17 Working Group. "I am confident that we are on track to coalesce the remaining technical proposals into a single unified draft that will meet the needs of metro carriers."

During the meeting, drafts of technical proposals were presented and from these drafts, the Working Group accepted text specifying two areas that will now become part of the initial draft document: the physical layer interface mechanisms and management (i.e., OAMP). Additionally, the group reached an agreement on the Media Access Control (MAC) Reference Model that will serve as the basis for developing the MAC protocol.

The IEEE 802.17 Working Group meeting included approximately 120 attendees representing network equipment vendors, semiconductor vendors, network chip companies, carriers, service providers, members of the academic community, and industry consultants from the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

The RPR specification is being crafted so that metro networks can carry more data with greater reliability and efficiency and at lower cost. RPR will support carrier-class, service-level-agreement (SLA)-based metro Ethernet, IP, and legacy TDM services. The RPR Alliance was founded to support the standardization effort and educate the global market on the benefits of RPR. The first draft of the RPR standard is expected in the first quarter of 2002.

For more information about the alliance, visit www.RPRAlliance.org.