How does a Frame Relay Work?

Sanat Shukla

The FR(Frame Relay) supports the multiplexing of traffic from multiple connections over a shared physical link.

It involves the use of hardware components, such as packing data from router frames, bridges, and switches, etc. into individual frame relay messages.

Here, Every connection uses a 10_bit Data_Link_Connection_Identifier(DLCI) for unique channel addressing. There are two types of connections:

The PVCs(PermanentVirtualCircuits) for persistent connections intended to be maintained for long periods even if data is not actively transferred.

The SVCs(SwitchedVirtualCircuits) for temporary connections that last only one session.

The FrameRelay then places the data in a variable-size unit called a frame and leaves any necessary error correction (data retransmission) until the endpoints, speeding up the overall transmission of data.

The Features of frame relay:

• The FrameRelay operates at a high speed (1.544 Mbps to 44.376 Mbps).
• The FrameRelay operates only in the physical and data link layers. ...
• This allows the bursty data.
• That has a large frame size of 9000 bytes. ...
• The FrameRelay can only detect errors (at the data link layer). ...
• The damaged frame is simply dropped.