SmartBridge: a scalable bridge architecture

摘要: As the number of hosts attached to a network increases beyond what can be connected by single local area (LAN), forwarding packets between on different LANs becomes an issue. Two common solutions problem are IP routing and spanning tree bridging. scales well, but imposes administrative burden managing subnets assigning addresses. Spanning bridging, in contrast, requires no administration, often does not perform well large network, because too much traffic must detour toward root tree, wasting link bandwidth.