Positioning of the RPR standard in contemporary operator environments

This article deals with the fundamentals and current standardization efforts for IEEE 802.17 resilient packet ring. Its special resilience features make this technology robust against outages of the network infrastructure. The goals of this article are threefold. First, the fundamentals of RPR and the standardization process carried out under the auspices of IEEE and ITU are overviewed. Second, potentially hazardous situations involving traffic assignments are defined and illustrated. Finally, possible situations where the simplicity, enhanced throughput, and automatic resilience features of RPR may be advantageous for network operators are identified.