# Frame relay

### From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Frame relay is an efficient data transmission technique used to send digital information quickly and cheaply to one or many destinations from one point. It can be used for voice, data, local area network (LAN), and wide area network (WAN) traffic. Each frame relay end user gets a private line to a frame relay node. The frame relay network handles the transmission to its other end users over a path which is always changing and is invisible to the end users.

Frame relay is a packet switched Telecommunications network, commonly used at the data link layer (layer 2) of the Open Systems Interconnection reference model. Generally the concept of permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) is used to form logical end-to-end links mapped over a physical network. Switched virtual circuits (SVCs), analogous to circuit switching in the public switched telephone network, are also part of the Frame relay specification but are rarely applied in the real world. Frame relay was originally developed as a stripped-down version of the X.25 protocol.

Datalink Connection Identifiers or DLCIs are a locally significant numeric value to represent each end point. Multiple PVCs can be mapped to the same physical end point. It is often provisioned with a Committed Information Rate (CIR) and a burstable component sometimes known as Extended Information Rate (EIR).

Frame relay was designed to make more efficient use of existing physical resources, thereby allowing the overprovisioning of data services to telco customers, as most clients are unlikely to be utilising a data service 100 percent of the time. Frame relay has acquired a bad reputation in some markets because of excessive bandwidth overbooking by telcos.

Frame relay is/was often sold by Telecommunications companies to businesses looking for a cheaper alternative than dedicated lines, its use in different areas depending on governmental and telecommunication's companies policies. Two of the first major Frame Relay products were the IPX and the BPX developed by StrataCom.

Frame relay is being displaced by ATM and native IP based products, including IP virtual private networks.

[edit]

## See Also

- Multiprotocol Label Switching

[edit]

## External links

- The Frame Relay Forum (http://www.mplsforum.org/frame/)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_relay"

Categories: Network protocols

##### Views

- Article
- Discussion
- Edit this page
- History

##### Personal tools

- Create account / log in

##### Search

##### Toolbox

- What links here
- Related changes
- Special pages

##### In other languages

- Deutsch
- 日本語
- Polski
- Suomi
- 中文