Справочник Пользователя для Cabletron Systems TSX-1620

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Using the TSX-1620 Bridge View
3-2
Bridging Basics
Transparent Bridging
Transparent bridges are most common in Ethernet networks. Individual 
Transparent bridges monitor packet traffic on attached network segments to learn 
their network segment location in terms of which bridge port receives packets 
originated from a particular station (determined via the packet’s Source Address 
field). This information gets stored in the bridge’s Filtering Database. When in the 
Forwarding state, the bridge compares a packet’s destination address to the 
information in the Filtering Database to determine if the packet should be 
forwarded to another network segment or filtered (i.e., not forwarded). A bridge 
filters a packet if it determines that the packet’s destination address exists on the 
same side of the bridge as the source address.
Transparent bridges in a network communicate with one another by exchanging 
Bridge Protocol Data Units, or BPDUs, and collectively implement a Spanning 
Tree Algorithm (STA) to determine the network topology, to ensure that only a 
single data route exists between any two end stations, and to ensure that the 
topology information remains current.
Source Route Bridging
Source Routing is typically used to connect two or more Token Ring network 
segments. Source Route bridges differ from Transparent bridges in that they do 
not build and then use a physical address database to make forwarding decisions. 
Instead, Source Route bridges read routing information included by the source 
station and added by other bridges in a packet’s header to determine where to 
forward the packet. 
In Source Routing, sending and receiving devices employ broadcast packets —
otherwise known as explorer packets — to determine the most efficient route for a 
message to travel. Generally, before a station sends a message, it will first send a 
test packet to all stations on the same ring; if the sending station receives a 
response to this packet, it knows that it does not need to include routing 
information in the Routing Information Field (RIF) of this packet and all 
subsequent packets it sends to the same station (i.e., the packets are not source 
routed and will appear as transparent-style packets). If the sending station does 
not receive a response to the test packet, it will send an explorer packet to the 
destination; the explorer packet will be propagated by the network’s bridges as 
either All Paths Explorer (APE) packets or as one Spanning Tree Explorer (STE) 
packet. The task of both packet types is to get the destination station to return 
specific route information to the sending station.
APE packets are sent to the destination station over every possible bridge path 
when multiple bridge paths are available between any two local area network 
stations. (Because of the method used by bridges to forward SR packets, the 
presence of data loops in a network is not an issue for SR packets as it is for 
packets that must be Transparently bridged.) The original APE frame contains no 
routing information (e.g., bridge numbers and ring numbers); it is propagated 
along all available paths to the destination station. Each bridge along the way 
adds its own bridge and ring numbers to the packet’s RIF before forwarding it,