The totality of frame relay circuits within a telecommunication carrier’s frame relay network. This frame relay network is commonly known as a Frame Relay Bearer Service (FRBS).
Typically, a frame relay cloud is a collection of packet-switching devices owned by the carrier and used as a shared public network for backboning wide area network (WAN) traffic for private customers.
Frame relay clouds can also consist of frame relay circuits owned by private networking consortiums. The frame relay network is described as a “cloud” because of the large number of interconnections between the various edge switches, usually forming a fully connected mesh topology.
In frame relay services, each frame of information contains the routing information needed to enable the frame to be routed to its destination through the cloud.