Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches and Internetworking Protocols, Second Edition

Chapter 3. Transparent Bridges

Transparent bridges were originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and were adopted by the 802.1 committee. For clarity, I will "build" a transparent bridge by adding features.

The Digital bridges and the standardized 802.1 bridges have all the following features:

• The promiscuous listen and the store and forward capabilities of the "no-frills" bridge, as described in Section3.1

• The station learning cache of the "learning" bridge, as described in Section3.2

• The spanning tree algorithm of the "complete" bridge, as described in Section 3.3

Note: The intermediate forms of the bridge ("no frills" and "learning") are not standard bridges. To conform to 802.1d, a bridge must implement both learning and the spanning ...