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| 10.3 |  | Examining Fiber Optic Transports |
| 10.3.4 |  | Defining Dynamic Packet Transport |

Dynamic Packet Transport (DPT) is a resilient packet ring technology designed to deliver scalable Internet service, reliable IP-aware optical transport, and simplified network operations. For metropolitan area applications, DPT-based solutions allow Service Providers to cost effectively scale and distribute their Internet and IP services across a reliable optical packet ring infrastructure. DPT is based on Spatial Reuse Protocol (SRP), a Cisco-developed MAC-layer protocol for ring-based packet internetworking. Cisco has submitted SRP to the IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) Working Group for consideration as a standard.

Dynamic Packet Transport:

1. Replaces the complexity of SONET/SDH by the simplicity of Ethernet, but retains the main benefits of SONET/SDH
2. Is an implementation of the Big Fat Pipe (BFP) concept. Bandwidth allocation is not fixed. The system tries to utilize all available bandwidth as much as possible using statistical time-domain multiplexing
3. Extends rich IP functionality over the metro area by replacing the legacy time-division multiplexing (TDM) nodes with DPT nodes and mapping the physical topology into IP
4. Significantly reduces the configuration management requirements since, from the IP perspective, a DPT ring is as simple to handle as an Ethernet segment.

At the time this module was written, the IEEE 802.17 standards were still in draft form. The new standard will use existing Physical Layer specifications and will develop new PHYs where appropriate.