Goralski has provided the networking world with an exhaustive book on frame relay networks and services. Until this book, most of the readings on frame relay have been from journals or from chapters in other books that relate frame relay to other technologies, such as asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), or books that address communication networks for multimedia processing. This book is designed for people with some background in wide area networking and can also serve as a very good text for a university course on the use of frame relay in telecommunications networks.
The book has 13 chapters, a bibliography, a list of acronyms used in the book, and an index. The first chapter presents an overview of networking technology and the role frame relay plays in that technology. It addresses the popular technologies--Ethernet-type local area networks (LANs), the Internet, and the World Wide Web--and then introduces frame relay in terms of its significance and function. This is followed by a description of point-to-point private lines and their bandwidth and connectivity limitations, thus paving the way for the benefits of frame relay in such networks. Chapter 2 examines the public data networks in terms of their common characteristics and traces the history of the public voice network in the United States. The X.25 network is presented in some detail, and the chapter closes with the relationship between X.25 and frame relay.
Chapter 3 gives a general overview of frame relay networks. It starts with an explanation of the structure of a frame relay network and emphasizes both the physical structure of the network and the need to maintain an adequate quality of service (QoS) for voice and video services while still handling the usual extremely bursty data applications. Chapter 4 then demonstrates the most visible portion of the frame relay network from the user’s perspective, the user-network interface (UNI), and explains other issues involved with connecting a user to a frame relay network, including the key concept of committed information rate, which is often confusing.
Chapter 5 deals with frame relay signaling. It examines the various protocols involved with call setup, maintenance, and release. The chapter also discusses the resource allocation and billing problems associated with frame relay networks. Chapter 6 describes how frame relay handles congestion, specifically the methods used to handle congestion and flow control.
Chapter 7, on link management, focuses on the management of network architectures by explaining how the links are managed and elaborating on link management messages and their formats. The author explains the role played by the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Management Information Base (MIB). Chapter 8 presents the details of the frame relay network-to-network interface (NNI). Goralski explains the implementation, coordination, and management of the NNI and then explores its event-driven procedures and its future as it relates to the entire future of frame relay. Chapter 9 discusses voice over frame relay and the use of frame relay in supporting multimedia data transmissions and includes a good tutorial on voice digitization and silence suppression.
Chapters 10, 11, and 12, respectively, compare frame relay with Systems Network Architecture (SNA), the Internet Protocol (IP), and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). Finally, chapter 13 predicts and discusses the future of frame relay. The chapter also compares frame relay with other new technologies, such as Gigabit Ethernet, and examines the threats that may be posed to the future of frame relay networks. The bibliography is quite informative and includes some interesting Web pages that provide more information on frame relay technology.
For any book on networking technology, a list of acronyms is handy, and the glossary here meets readers’ needs. The index is exhaustive. The one problem with the book is the numerous typographical errors, which are rather distracting.
