Well, if we're talking about Multilink PPP from a PM2E with a 5BRI card in
it, dialing into anything else that has at least five BRIs and supports
Multilink PPP (really supports it :), then you should be able to do this no
problem. The overhead associated with it should be only any associated with
frame fragmentation.
Our "Multi-line load balancing" is a Livingston to Livingston thing, but our
Multilink PPP works with anyone who has implemented RFC 1717 properly.
Now in terms of overhead, the way you do your fragmentation of frames across
the multiple channels makes a big difference in your overall performance.
Multilink PPP requires round robin distribution of fragments--thats part of
the spec. However it doesn't require fragmenting. Some vendors' MP doesn't
implement fragmentation, which is awful. Some fragment based on fixed
sizes, no matter how big the frame is, which increases header overhead and
processing latency on smaller frames. This defeats the purpose of
Multilinks, which is to decrease the latency of transmission by sending
stuff in parallel. We dynamically measure the size of packets and frames,
and size our fragments equally across all channels, down to a minimum
fragment size. This makes for the lowest latency, and most efficient
fragmentation and reassembly process.
Hope this helps.
alex
Alex Henthorn Livingston Enterprises
Senior Technical Product Manager 6920 Koll Center Parkway #220
Product Marketing Engineer Pleasanton, CA 94566
alex@livingston.com Voice 510-485-6787 Fax 510-244-1903