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.