802.1Q Vlan Tags - D-Link DGS-3427 User Manual

xStack DGS-3400 Series Fast Ethernet Switch
Figure 7- 1. IEEE 802.1Q Packet Forwarding

802.1Q VLAN Tags

The figure below shows the 802.1Q VLAN tag. There are four additional octets inserted after the source MAC address.
Their presence is indicated by a value of 0x8100 in the EtherType field. When a packet's EtherType field is equal to
0x8100, the packet carries the IEEE 802.1Q/802.1p tag. The tag is contained in the following two octets and consists of 3
bits of user priority, 1 bit of Canonical Format Identifier (CFI - used for encapsulating Token Ring packets so they can be
carried across Ethernet backbones), and 12 bits of VLAN ID (VID). The 3 bits of user priority are used by 802.1p. The
VID is the VLAN identifier and is used by the 802.1Q standard. Because the VID is 12 bits long, 4094 unique VLANs can
be identified.
The tag is inserted into the packet header making the entire packet longer by 4 octets. All of the information originally
contained in the packet is retained.
Figure 7- 2. IEEE 802.1Q Tag
82