It is especially effective for the bursty traffic typical of most LAN interconnection applications. A physical frame relay port can have multiple virtual circuits, each connecting to a different destination port. By restricting its use to Layers 1 and 2, frame relay performs error detection only, whereas X.25 performs both error detection and retransmission.
Frame relay leaves retransmission up to the intelligent devices at each end of the network.
In the event of errors, frame relay simply drops bad frames to reduce overhead and enable greater throughput. Congestion is handled through vendor implementation of the congestion management techniques described in the frame relay standards. Standards-compliant congestion management means that, even during congestion, each end user device has guaranteed access to a defined amount of bandwidth. Frame relay also provides tremendous flexibility in terms of the types of devices that can be connected to the network. Because it is protocol transparent above Layer 2, the data link layer, most types of traffic can ride over a frame relay network without realizing that frame relay is being used.