High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Metro Ring Protocol (MRP) is a Layer 2 resilience protocol developed by Foundry Networks and currently being delivered in products manufactured by Brocade Communications Systems and Hewlett Packard. The protocol quite tightly specifies a topology in which layer 2 devices, usually at the core of a larger network, are configured and as such is able to achieve much faster failover times than other Layer 2 protocols such as Spanning Tree.