
Evolving SAN, GbE/10GbE, and Metro Ethernet Technologies ◾ 281
RSTP offers a reduction in the time taken to reconfigure the active topology of the bridged LAN
when changes to the physical topology or its configuration parameters take place. e IEEE
802.1w standard specifies the operation of MAC bridges that attach directly to IEEE 802 LANs.
Specifically, the configuration protocol and associated algorithm required for the distributed com-
putation of a Spanning Tree active topology appears in two forms in this standard: one section
(Clause 8) specifies a version of the Spanning Tree algorithm and protocol that is consistent with
the specification con ...