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D
S
F
ESCRIPTION OF
OFTWARE
EATURES
IEEE 802.1D Bridge – The switch supports IEEE 802.1D transparent
bridging. The address table facilitates data switching by learning addresses,
and then filtering or forwarding traffic based on this information. The
address table supports up to 16K addresses.
Store-and-Forward Switching – The switch copies each frame into its
memory before forwarding them to another port. This ensures that all
frames are a standard Ethernet size and have been verified for accuracy
with the cyclic redundancy check (CRC). This prevents bad frames from
entering the network and wasting bandwidth.
To avoid dropping frames on congested ports, the switch provides 1 MB
for frame buffering. This buffer can queue packets awaiting transmission
on congested networks.
Spanning Tree Algorithm – The switch supports these spanning tree
protocols:
Spanning Tree Algorithm (STA, IEEE 802.1D) – When there are multiple
physical paths between segments, this protocol will choose a single path
and disable all others to ensure that only one route exists between any two
stations on the network. This prevents the creation of network loops.
However, if the chosen path should fail for any reason, an alternate path
will be activated to maintain the connection.
Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP, IEEE 802.1w) – This protocol
reduces the convergence time for network topology changes to about 3-5
seconds of that required by the older IEEE 802.1D STA standard. It is
intended as a complete replacement for STA, but can still interoperate with
switches running the older standard by automatically reconfiguring ports
to STP-compliant mode if they detect STA protocol messages from
attached devices.
Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP, IEEE 802.1s) – This protocol is
a direct extension of RSTP. It can provide an independent spanning tree
for different VLANs. It simplifies network management, provides for even
faster convergence than RSTP by limiting the size of each region, and
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