Nepean, Ontario-headquartered Gandalf Technologies Inc has added integrated Frame Relay Congestion Management software to its Access 2000 range of wide area networking products, claiming to be the first wide area network supplier to offer a solution to the problem of Frame Relay congestion. This, the company says, is particularly problematic with applications including bulk file transfers, where frames can be discarded and are not re-transmitted. The software is based on the American National Standards Institution BECN Backward Explicit Congestion Notification standard. Within the company’s Access 2300 Frame Relay Concentration Module the software is implemented to provide congestion notification, by monitoring the number of bytes queued for transmission on each outgoing channel. As the frames are posted to a channel for transmission, the frame length is added to the queue length in the Channel Control Table: when this reaches a user-defined threshold, a Backward Explicit Congestion Notification is transmitted back to the router (either the company’s Access 2120 bridge-router or its stand-alone bridge-router) connected to the source local network. The router then modifies the forwarding rate until the congestion is cleared. No price for the software.
