Abstract

Session

Routing and Bridging

Paper

6-2

Full Paper

ps.gz

Title

SmartBridge: A Scalable Bridge Architecture

Author(s)

Thomas L. Rodeheffer (Compaq Systems Research Center)
Chandramohan A. Thekkath (Compaq Systems Research Center)
Darrell Anderson (Duke University)

Abstract:

As the number of hosts attached to a network increases beyond what can be connected by a single local area network (LAN), forwarding packets between hosts on different LANs becomes an issue. Two common solutions to the forwarding problem are IP routing and spanning-tree bridging. IP routing scales well, but imposes the administrative burden of managing subnets and assigning addresses. Spanning-tree bridging, in contrast, requires no administration, but often does not perform well in a large network, because too much traffic must funnel through the root of the spanning tree, creating a bottleneck.
This paper introduces a new architecture, called SmartBridge, that combines the good features of IP routing and spanning-tree bridging. We have implemented the SmartBridge design for 10 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s Ethernet LANs, using standard PC hardware with off-the-shelf network interface cards and running our algorithms in software. Our 100 Mb/s system runs at full link bandwidth.