IEEE 802.17, Resilient Packet
Ring Networks Enabled by
FPGAs
By: Nick Possley
Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) is a transport technology
that has been available for several years. The
standard IEEE 802.17 specifies the transport. This
transport technology provides a wide range of
services that are just now becoming very important
to the industry for deployment of IP based
multimedia services.
Demand for this technology is increasing, and Xilinx
has invested in a supported reference design that
utilizes the Virtex?-4 family of FPGAs to create a
complete RPR MAC solution for equipment
vendors. The solution includes hardware and
software that provides full compliance to IEEE
802.17.
This paper describes RPR as a network, explains
how the MAC operates to provide required network
functionality, gives a high-level view of the Virtex-4
implementation of the MAC including device sizing,
and covers a few system design use cases.