The MPLS/Frame Relay Alliance, which also met in Vienna, Virginia earlier this month, announced a new project to address FR/ATM service interworking as well as increased focus on FR/ATM/Ethernet service interworking. These projects align with the results of a June MPLS/Frame Relay industry survey in which more than 200 service providers and vendors identified ATM/Frame Relay/Ethernet Service Interworking as the most important work area for the Alliance. Some of the specific items from the meeting included the following.
- the Frame Relay (FR) working group is developing an update to FRF.8.1 to mandate traffic shaping enhancements on FR to ATM connections conforming to specific ATM service contract conditions. The goal of the resulting FRF.8.2 is to differentiate between equipment that can decrease the FR to ATM interworking cell loss when FR bursts exceed the ATM contract and FR.8.1-compliant equipment that may not have this capability. In addition, the working group is continuing its cooperative work effort with the ITU-T Study Group 17 in the development of X.84 FR/MPLS Network Interworking. This work will expedite the development of the FR over MPLS implementations
- the Applications & Deployment (A&D) working group began a new work item on TDM over MPLS using raw encapsulation, as a result of a direct request from several members. The working group has also started work on a Resilient MPLS NNI, to provide a fault tolerant, carrier-to-carrier interface using MPLS.
The Interoperability working group is developing various test suites. Interworking will be added for Layer 2 VPNs, while further test cases are being developed for Fast Re-route and VPLS as these features progress through the standards process. Layer 2 VPNs, Fast Re-route and VPLS were recently showcased at the MPLS/Frame Relay Alliance Interoperability demonstration conducted among 12 member companies at SUPERCOMM 2003.
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