| It's not a well-defined concept at all. The standard makes no mention of
it, so any implementation that claims to do this is doing something proprietary.
This means that it isn't clear whether it will interoperate with standard
nodes.
The supposed benefits are also vague. One that is mentioned is "less disruption
on station insertion". This might possibly be true for some situations on
some rings some of the time, but the penalty is variable and potentially
quite long disruption (as opposed to fixed very brief disruption in the
standard approach, which we implement).
Another drawback apart from what I already mentioned is substantially
greater complexity in both hardware and software -- hence lower MTBF and
higher bug count.
paul
|