BRP - A NEW LEARNING BRIDGE FOR OSINET

With the advent of high speed networking and ATM, there has been a gro wing interest in introducing these technologies in the working environ ment of different organizations. In order to effectively manage the ab rupt transition to a high speed environment, such networks are being s et up as backbone networks. The existing legacy LANs connect to these backbones through various internetworking devices such as bridges and routers. In such a scenario, the performance of the internetworking de vices become a critical issue to be addressed in design. In this paper we propose a new approach for bridging called Bridge Registration Pro tocol (BRP), which is a modification of the transparent bridge approac h. The proposal reduces the number of packets that are hooded during t he learning phase of the bridge. The BRP approach performs better when the number of networks connected to the bridge is high. Further when there is heavy traffic between stations which are logically disconnect ed in an Extended LAN (i.e. a number of LANs connected by repeaters an d bridges), BRP outperforms the transparent bridge approach. An addres s lookup scheme based on B-tree is used to ensure that the address dat abase in the bridge does not slow down the operation of the bridge. (C ) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.