Sponsors: Agilent
Host: David Robertson, Transport Marketing Programs Manager, Agilent Technologies
Date: Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Time: 2:00 p.m. New York/ 7:00 p.m. London
Overview:
Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) has recently been standardized by IEEE 802.17 and is spreading at a phenomenal rate for metro Ethernet network applications. Next-gen Sonet/SDH devices such as MSPPs (multiservice provisioning platforms) are evolving to support RPR.

In this Webinar we will discuss the market drivers and benefits of RPR. According to Infonetics: "Worldwide RPR revenue hit $323 million in 2003, and is projected to grow 200% to $967 million by 2007, a CAGR of 32%. Service providers are figuring in RPR over Sonet/SDH plans much more now than they were even six months ago. In fact, 63% now say they plan to offer Ethernet services over RPR in the next few years.”

Key benefits of RPR include:
•Bandwidth efficiency
•Ease of management
•Carrier-class protection & resiliency
•Class-of-service support features
•Scaleability

A comparison of Ethernet versus Ethernet-over-RPR includes:
•Ethernet is designed for point-to-point and mesh topology networks, not ring topologies
•Ethernet has no fast protection mechanisms
•Ethernet has no fairness policies for sharing ring bandwidth.

There will be an overview of the fundamental types of RPR devices. There are two different classes of device that support RPR. These are packet-based devices, which may use either an Ethernet or Sonet/SDH PHY; and TDM circuit-switched platforms, which will use a Sonet/SDH PHY. In particular, we will focus on transport TDM circuit-switched RPR devices, outlining the structure of a generic RPR MSPP. We will focus on the importance of ensuring next-generation Sonet/SDH interoperability using new technologies such as Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), Virtual Concatenation (VCAT), Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS), Ethernet, and, of course, RPR.

There will be an outline of the basic operation of RPR, including the RPR mapping structure into next-gen Sonet/SDH and the RPR frame format, plus RPR basic node functions. An explanation of RPR resiliency, including ring wrapping and packet steering, will also be provided. The importance of ensuring RPR and next-gen Sonet/SDH interoperability will be covered by describing how to verify standards compliance in the following key areas:

•Interoperability and compliance at the RPR layer
•Interoperability and compliance at the GFP layer
•Interoperability and compliance at the Sonet/SDH layer
•LCAS protocol analysis
•Virtual Concatenation differential delay
•Ethernet payload integrity and the Agilent instrumented payload
•RPR system verification of protection switch times

*This is a custom Webinar. All slides and content matter have been provided by Agilent. Light Reading does not contribute to any content nor endorse the subject matter.

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