What is the Discard Eligibility (DE) bit?

The Discard Eligibility (DE) bit is part of the Address field in the Frame Relay frame header. Frames with DE bit indicate lower importance of the frames than other frames. DTE devices can set the value of the DE bit of a frame to 1 to indicate that the frame has lower importance than other frames. When a network is congested, DCE devices discard frames with the DE bit set before discarding those that do not. This reduces the chance of critical data being dropped by Frame Relay DCE devices during periods of network congestion.

In the event of network congestion, the frame could be discarded by a node in preference to others.

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