Fundamentals of Communications and Networking, 3rd Edition

IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation

VLANs provide the ability to segregate network traffic and increase performance. They make it possible to isolate certain types of traffic to their own collection of ports. The idea is to remove other types of traffic that can cause congestion and collisions. For example, an organization may choose to create a VLAN that transports only streaming video content. Creating a separate VLAN and using dynamic membership by protocol removes video traffic from other types of traffic. Sometimes, even the entire bandwidth of a single link is not enough. Link aggregation addresses this problem. Another important standard, IEEE 802.3ad, defines a standard method to combine multiple physical links so they can be used as a single ...