Simulative investigation of network services for resilient packet ring in steering mode

To recover link failure on resilient packet ring (RPR) networks, two protection mechanisms, steering and wrapping, defined in IEEE 802.17 can restore a failed network in less than 50 ms, and maintain link connectivity between each node. In this study, we focus on the RPR steering mechanism and the properties of the three different traffic classes defined in RPR by conducting simulation. We find that the frame delay of protection in comparison with the normal condition is much higher. In the steering mechanism, the head nodes of protected ringlet sections can seize more bandwidth than their downstream nodes. To actually see the qualitative difference of the MPEG video transmitted in the RPR steering mechanism, we develop and realize a software-based networking environment to emulate the transmission of MPEG video traffic under protection modes. From the result, we can see the difference between the original video and emulated video.