The IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) Working Group is on schedule to move to the draft stage in its standardization effort targeting the needs of carriers and service providers in metropolitan area networks (MANs), following its third plenary meeting held last week in Portland, Oregon.
RPR Alliance and Working Group member companies agreed to work closely together, consolidating technology proposals prior to creating drafts this fall for the RPR industry standard for fiber optic networks used in MANs. Dozens of individual proposals from many companies are being refined and merged to reduce the number of drafts and to bring the proposed solutions closer together. The IEEE 802.17 Working Group will then forge a single solution for balloting next spring.
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 drafts will provide details on the following major areas: Resiliency and Protection; RPR Frame Format; Topology Discovery Mechanisms; Physical Layer Reconciliation; Bandwidth Management; Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and Provisioning; MAC Service Reference Models; Aggregation; Service Classes; Bridging; Layer Management; and System Topology.
The IEEE 802.17 Working Group will next convene in San Jose, California, September 10 through 14. The IEEE 802.17 web site (www.ieee802.org/17) contains presentations and materials discussed at meetings.
About the Resilient Packet Ring Alliance:
The RPR Alliance, founded in January 2001, is a nonprofit organization committed to the development of an RPR technology standard for the networking industry. The Alliance will promote the adoption of an RPR standard for LANs, MANs, and WANs by educating the networking industry about RPR technology and the benefits of an IEEE standard and encouraging multi-vendor interoperability. Principal members of the RPR Alliance include Alcatel, Alidian Networks, AuroraNetics, Cisco Systems, Corrigent Systems, Cyras Systems, Dynarc, Lantern Communications, Luminous Networks, Mindspeed Technologies, Nortel Networks, Riverstone Networks, and Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation. Avaya Communication and Huawei Tech Co. are participating members in the Alliance. For more information, visit www.RPRAlliance.com.