Investigation of Topology Discovery Protocol of Resilient Packet Rings

Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) defines a new type of MAC protocol, which uses shared medium and spatial reuse protocol and intelligent protection mechanism. It also supports service level agreement (SLA) and plug-and-play. RPR is an important technology in metro area network (MAN). In this paper, we give a detailed description on one of the critical technology in RPR--topology discovery protocol, including the topology discovery packet format, algorithm and the implementation, etc. Finally, we analyze an example of RPR topology discovery.