Frame Relay Congestion Management

Frame Relay transfer system is high speed and high performance WAN protocol that is relatively cheap as compared to its other opponents.
In the transfer of data there are two possible ways to transfer data packet.

• Variable-length packets
• Statistical multiplexing

The first category of variable-length packets is used for well-organized and elastic data transfers due to its features. The packets are switched along the path and transferred to the destination.

The benefit of statistical multiplexing technique is that it transfers the data at high speed and uses full capacity of the bandwidth.

Frame Relay is also described as a modernize version as it offers the resending of corrupted data. It is supported more as it is reliable and gives high speed with accuracy.

Congestion-Control Mechanisms

Frame Relay is very co-operative in reducing network overhead by using simple congestion filtering techniques rather than complex time consuming techniques to control the congestion.
Frame Relay has two types of congestion management techniques.

• Forward-explicit congestion notification (FECN)
• Backward-explicit congestion notification (BECN)

FECN and BECN both of them are just controlled by the change of a single bit in the Frame Relay header file. This header file contains the command of the importance that has the ability to check files for there importance to be transfer or not. The less important file is dropped at the time of congestion and the important files are transferred.

The “FECN bit” is the part of the address in the Frame Relay frame header file. The FECN system is started as the DTE device sends Frame Relay data over the network. Suppose that if the network is congested, the DCE devices set the value of the frames' FECN bit to 1. It will tell the network to stop sending the data packets .

The “BECN bit” is the part of header. DCE device set the value to “1” for BECN bit. It tells the frames travelling to the opposite direction that there is congestion in the path.  The DTE device then decides that what data has to be sent and which not.