The Metro Ring Protocol (MRP) is a Layer 2 resilience protocol developed by

Foundry Networks Foundry Networks, Inc. was a networking hardware vendor selling high-end Ethernet switches and routers. The company was acquired by Brocade Communications Systems on December 18, 2008. History The company was founded in 1996 by Bobby R. Jo ...

and currently being delivered in products manufactured by

Brocade Communications Systems Brocade is an American technology company specializing in storage networking products, now a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. The company is known for its Fibre Channel storage networking products and technology. Prior to the acquisition, the comp ...

and

Hewlett Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

. The protocol quite tightly specifies a topology in which

layer 2 The data link layer, or layer 2, is the second layer of the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking. This layer is the protocol layer that transfers data between nodes on a network segment across the physical layer. The data link layer ...

devices, usually at the core of a larger network, are configured and as such is able to achieve much faster failover times than other Layer 2 protocols such as

Spanning Tree In the mathematical field of graph theory, a spanning tree ''T'' of an undirected graph ''G'' is a subgraph that is a tree which includes all of the vertices of ''G''. In general, a graph may have several spanning trees, but a graph that is no ...

See also