SUBOPTIMAL-OPTIMAL ROUTING FOR LAN INTERNETWORKING USING TRANSPARENT BRIDGES

1998

The current standard transparent bridge protocol IEEE-802.1D is based on the Spanning Tree (ST) algorithm. It has a very important restriction: it cannot work when the topology has active loops. Therefore, a tree is the only possible interconnection topology that can be used. The ST algorithm guarantees that the active topology is a tree discarding lines that form loops. However, because of this, network bandwidth cannot be fully utilized. Moreover, trees have a very serious bottleneck near the root. This paper proposes a new transparent bridge protocol for LAN interconnection that allows active loops. Therefore, strongly connected regular topologies like tori, hypercubes, meshes, etc., as…