Topology Discovery in Resilient Packet Ring Technology

Shahid Hussain Abbassi, National University of Science & Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan Hamjan14@hotmail.com Abstract
The focus of networking specialists has shifted from LANs to MANs due to shifting of traffic bottleneck. The target is to find a solution that may cater the needs of data as well as real time traffic. Ethernet being the choice for data traffic is nondeterministic, unfair, and lacks fast protection and restoration capabilities. SONET being the choice for circuit switching is not fit for data traffic due waste of bandwidth due to meshing, multicast packets and protection switching. Resilient Packet Ring technology combines best of both .Implemented in ring .topology. RPR can scale up to 95% and provides carrier class functionalities like fairness and fast protection and restoration [1]. It possesses self topology discovery mechanism that can be improved a bit if ring id is ignored while accepting topology discovery packet.

Umer Farooq National University of Science & Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

the traffic is intended for a particular node, the node closest will get half of the bandwidth [2].
2.5 Gbps 5 Gbps
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10 Gbps

Introduction
The volume of data traffic is increasing rapidly in Metropolitan Area Networks, thus has created a challenge for existing metro technologies which are mainly circuit switched like SDH/SONET or ATM. These technologies being the voice optimized are not efficient for carrying data traffic. Since the data traffic is mainly bursty hence packet based technologies like Ethernet suit it well. Ethernet is basically data suited cost effective solution. It makes efficient use of available bandwidth. It suits to point to point or meshed topologies and is not intended for ring topologies. It scales from 10Mbps to 10Gbps. It uses spanning tree protocol as a protection mechanism to achieve path redundancy in the case of fiber cut, but it is comparatively slow as failure condition is to be propagated serially to each upstream node. Hence it does not provide service quality of telco carrier class systems which require 99.99% service availability and restoration in the case of fiber cut with in 50ms. Ethernet being non-deterministic also does not provide fairness to all contending nodes. In a ring network if all

Figure 1: Unfairness in Ethernet Ring SONET on the other hand is a TDM based point to point circuit switched network. It implements a fast protection mechanism that can restore the traffic using an alternate path in the case of fiber failure with in 50ms. There are some disadvantages of using SONET for data traffic. Since it provides point to point circuits between ring nodes and each circuit is allocated a fixed amount of bandwidth which is wasted if not used. If the mesh network is used; all the available bandwidth is divided among all meshed circuits. This results in the inefficient use of ring bandwidth. In the case of multicast traffic, a separate copy of packet is sent to each destination. This results in multiple copies of a packet traveling around the ring, wasting bandwidth. SONET utilizes 50% of bandwidth for protection switching which is wasted and un-utilized in normal conditions. SONET supports carrier class functionalities such as fast protection and restoration and fairness but lacks to support bursty nature of data traffic. It can not provide the bandwidth more than fixed if certain node needs it for data transmission. There are also challenges for packets over SONET in

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which multiple users share a common path which requires superior bandwidth efficiency, fast protection mechanism, and fairness [3].

Resilient Packet Ring

IEEE standard organization has formed 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) working group for the development of 802.17 standard. The main goals of RPR are: Protection switching in less than 50ms time. Using Spatial Reuse technique to optimize ring bandwidth. Self topology discovery mechanism. Support for physical layers such as Ethernet, SONET/SDH, and WDM. Fair access to ring bandwidth. Segregation of customer traffic on a shared ring. RPR is a new MAC layer technology, which uses spatial reuse to maximize bandwidth utilization, employs a fairness algorithm, ensures high speed traffic protection mechanism similar to SONET, and uses automatically generated topology discovery map to be used by packets to choose the ring. RPR uses two counter rotating rings for data as well as control packets [3].

stripped and occupy whole ring bandwidth. This technique is advantageous specially in the cases where most of the metro traffic remains within in same metro network. The RPR is designed to guarantee fairness across whole of the ring. Fairness is achieved by running a fairness algorithm by each node on the ring to ensure fair share on the ring. Each node also uses spatial reuse to use unutilized sections of the ring. This provides more than the fair share on the ring. Since the networks have dynamically changing traffic patterns, the only way to optimize the bandwidth utilization is to have a feedback mechanism to inform the source about the capacity available on the ring. In this way the nodes may tune their usage. Each node can then send more packets or throttle back. This enables RPR to scale beyond 95% of their total capacity [2]. RPR supports the multicast traffic. For a unicast packet it is to be stripped by destination node as discussed above. If the packet is a multicast it is saved and its copy is sent to other intended destinations until the packet is received by source node which strips the packet. Hence instead of sending multiple copies only one copy of packet is sent there by freeing bandwidth. Fast protection and restoration mechanism makes RPR a carrier class technology. Due to its self healing capabilities rings automatically recover from the fiber cut with in 50ms. The traffic is wrapped the ring section having fault from inner ring to outer ring or from outer to inner or it is steered away from the faulty section.

Figure 3: Wrapping of traffic due to fiber cut. RPR also saves dedicated 50% protection bandwidth as used by SONET/SDH. RPR nodes around the faulty segment of the ring use special IPS packets to propagate the fault information to other nodes on the ring. Other nodes on receiving IPS packet related to fault change their status from idle to pass through. In pass through these nodes just pass on protection packets from one wrapped node to other wrapped node. Due to generation of new topology map the data traffic take new optimized route up to destination not involving faulty ring segment. When the fault clears, the nodes around the fault send IPS packets containing

Figure 2: RPR Dual Counter Rotating Rings RPR uses spatial reuse principle to maximize the overall traffic on the rings. According to this principle the traffic on the ring flows only between source and the destination node. Packets are stripped by the destination node thereby freeing the bandwidth on other ring segments to be used freely by other nodes to between each other. This is in contrast to other ring topologies like FDDI in which packets are source

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restoration information. Other nodes on the ring change their status from pass through to idle mode, thus behave as normal node. The wrap is also cleared and with the generation of new topology discovery map, traffic start flowing normally. Due to fast protection and restoration mechanism RPR prevents the loss of high priority critical traffic just like SONET does. This allows to send real time traffic on the network involving RPR.

well as the bandwidth as the packet will have to travel less. This is clarified in figure 6.

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Topology Discovery
To send a packet on the ring, every node must have the topology map to decide on which ring the packet is to be sent. In order to get an updated map of the ring topology, every node periodically sends topology discovery packets on both rings. The node generating the packet marks it with ring id, wrap status, appends its MAC address, and sets the topology length field. This packet is point to point and hops from node to node. Every node receiving the packet appends its MAC address, ring id, wrap status, and resets the length field. Intermediate nodes receiving the topology discovery packet checks the ring id with that of receiving ring. Information is only updated if ring ids match [4]. After all the packet reaches the node which have generated it. On receiving one packet from each ring or two consecutive packets from any ring topology map is build based on information contained in the packet.

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Figure 5: Topology Discovery Packet Path due to Wrap

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Figure 6: Topology Discovery Packet Path Suggested In figure 6 packet originated by N3 from outer ring and collects information of only N2 node. Similarly the packet sent on inner ring by N3 will collect the information of nodes N4, N5, N6, and N1. On receipt of both packets by N3 topology map can be developed which adds information from both packets. In normal conditions packets from both the rings will collect information of all nodes. In this condition information received from both the packets are compared. The ring id of nodes is set depending on smaller hop count.

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Figure 4: Normal path of Topology Discovery Packet. If there is a wrap on the ring, the topology discovery packet will have to travel a longer path to reach the originating node if it is to be received on same ring id as in figure 5. Instead packet must be received by originated node and stripped irrespective of the ring id match. This will save the processing time as

Conclusion
Resilient packet ring is the technology of future which will ultimately solve the traffic problems faced by real time as well as data. Its fast protection and restoration mechanism and fairness has solved the problem of real time traffic was facing on data oriented technologies where as its efficient use of bandwidth

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and spatial reuse has solved the problem for data traffic, it was facing on circuit switched technologies.

References 1. An Introduction to Resilient Packet Ring Technology URL:www.rpralliance.org 2. Resilient Packet Ring Technology Overview by Corrigent Systems URL:www.corrigent.com/pdfs/RPR _ Technology_0103.pdf 3. Appian Communications Strategy for IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring Networks. URL:www.appiancom.com 4. Spatial Reuse Protocol Technology by Cisco Systems URL:grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/ 17/documents/presentations/tutorial/sr p_overview.pdf

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