Understanding the Network: A Practical Guide to Internetworking

Bridging Functionality

The first LAN network bridges to be developed were Ethernet transparent bridges. They were created by the Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the members of the original DIX Ethernet standards consortium. The transparent bridge standard was later co-opted by the IEEE as part of the 802.1 standard, which describes Layer 2 addressing and management concerns. Source route bridges were developed by IBM. Originally, source route bridging vied with transparent bridging to be the 802.1-bridging standard. It lost out, but later emerged as part of the 802.5 Token Ring standard. Source route bridging is dependent on the utilization of the Routing Information Field (RIF), which is an optional field in the Token Ring frame (see ...