Frame Relay Local and Global Addressing

In Frame Relay, each device has a Data Link Connection Identifier (DLCI) to identify each virtual circuit. DLCIs are locally significant, which means that the DLCI used on one interface has no correlation to the DLCI used on another interface.

When using local addressing, each router is responsible for mapping the DLCIs to the corresponding destination addresses. This method requires manual configuration on each router and is not scalable.

In contrast, with global addressing, the Frame Relay network provides a mechanism to map a DLCI to a network layer address. Global addressing allows for automatic address resolution and eliminates the need for manual configuration on each router. The two types of global addressing are Inverse ARP and Dynamic Address Mapping (DAM).