IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring Background and Overview Fredrik Davik, Mete Yilmaz, Stein Gjessing, Necdet Uzun Abstract — The IEEE Working group P802.17 is standardizing a new ring topology network architecture, called the Resilient Packet Ring (RPR), to be used mainly in metropolitan and wide area networks. This paper presents a technology background, gives an overview, and explains many of the design choices the RPR working group faced during the development of the standard. Some major architectural features are illustrated and compared by showing performance evaluation results using the RPR simulator developed at Simula Research Laboratory using the OPNET Modeler simulation environment. Index Terms— Communications, Networking, MAN, WAN, Ring networks, Spatial reuse, Fairness. Fredrik Davik is with Simula Research Laboratory and Ericsson Research Mete Yilmaz is with Cisco Systems Stein Gjessing is with Simula Research Laboratory and is a visiting scholar at Department of Computer Engineering, San Jose State University Necdet Uzun is with Cisco Systems A shorter version of this report is to appear in IEEE Communications Magazine March 2004. Simula Research Laboratory, Technical Report 11-2003, December 2003