Increasing Throughput with Frame Relay

gojericho0

One of our clients offices has a T1 that uses frame relay as the layer 2 protocol. There is an open slot to add another T1 WIC to increase the bandwidth. With PPP one of the advantages is you can bundle the circuits and multilink the interfaces to make it look like one logical connection.

Is there way to do this with the frame-relay protocol, or is the only option using frame-relay to assign each interface its own IP address load-balance and load-balance the interfaces?

kalebksp

Multilink Frame Relay, you'll have to find out from your ISP whether they support it as it needs to be configured on both sides.

gojericho0

thanks,
one more thing. what would the pros/cons of bundling at layer 2 as opposed to load balancing at layer 3 and vise versa?

i would think doing this at layer 2 would be preferred since packets would not arrive out of order?

Aldur

As long as both links are going to the same provider I wouldn't think about L3 load balancing. If you can make the 2 links appears as one link and double the bandwidth then there is so many advantages over L3 load balancing.

With that being said I would recommend MLFR FRF.16 which is essentially MLPPP, FRF.15 is more for multiple DLCI's on the same or different links.

gojericho0

Aldur wrote: »

As long as both links are going to the same provider I wouldn't think about L3 load balancing. If you can make the 2 links appears as one link and double the bandwidth then there is so many advantages over L3 load balancing.

With that being said I would recommend MLFR FRF.16 which is essentially MLPPP, FRF.15 is more for multiple DLCI's on the same or different links.

They would be with the same provider, and the circuits would be engineered along the same path