Question

What is Frame Relay? What is its maximum throughput? What is its advantage and disadvantage?

Answer 1

Frame relay is a packet-switching telecommunication service designed for cost-efficient data transmission for intermittent traffic between local area networks (LANs) and between endpoints in wide area networks (WANs). The service, once widely available and implemented, is in the process of being discontinued by major Internet service providers. Frame relay is scalable - implementations are available from low bandwidths (eg, 56 kbps), all the way up to T1 ( 1.544 Mbps ) or even T3 ( 45 Mbps ) speeds.

Benefits or advantages of Frame Relay

Following are the benefits or advantages of Frame Relay:
It offers higher speeds. This is because of no error detection is incorporated and hence overhead is less. It offers high throughput compare to X.25.
The bandwidth can be allocated dynamically as per need.
The network overhead is less due to incorporation of congestion control mechanism.
It allows bursty data which do not have fixed data rate.
It operates at layer-1 (physical) and layer-2 (datalink). Hence it is easy to integrate with devices having layer-3 (i.e. network) layer functionalities.
It allows frame size of 9000 bytes which is enough for all the LAN frame types.
It is less expensive compare to traditional WAN networks.
It offers guaranteed throughput and delay.
It provides secured connection as it is difficult to break into PVCs between the sites.

Drawbacks or disadvantages of Frame Relay

Following are the disadvantages of Frame Relay:
The flow control and error control is not available in frame relay. This should be taken care by upper layer protocols.
Packets incur additional delay with every node they pass through.
It involves data overhead and processing overhead with every packet.
It allows variable length frames and hence may create varying delays for different users.
Due to varying delay, it is not suitable to send sensitive data like real time voice or video.
It can operate at 44.376 Mbps and hence it is not suitable for protocols requiring higher data rates.
It is more expensive compare to internet service.