April 2013
Beginner
80 pages
1h 57m
English
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Chapter 1. Basic Switch Operation
What an Ethernet Switch Does
Ethernet switches link Ethernet devices together by relaying Ethernet frames between the devices connected to the switches. By moving Ethernet frames between the switch ports, a switch links the traffic carried by the individual network connections into a larger Ethernet network.
Ethernet switches perform their linking function by bridging Ethernet frames between Ethernet segments. To do this, they copy Ethernet frames from one switch port to another, based on the Media Access Control (MAC) addresses in the Ethernet frames. Ethernet bridging was initially defined in the 802.1D IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks: Media Access Control (MAC) Bridges.[1]
The standardization of bridging operations in switches makes it possible to buy switches from different vendors that will work together when combined in a network design. That’s the result of lots of hard work on the part of the standards engineers to define a set of standards that vendors could agree upon and implement in their switch designs.
Bridges and Switches
The first Ethernet bridges were two-port devices that could link two of the original Ethernet system’s coaxial cable segments together. At that time, Ethernet only supported connections to coaxial cables. Later, when twisted-pair Ethernet was developed and switches with many ports became widely available, they were often used as the central connection point, or hub, of Ethernet cabling systems, ...
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