Name: draft-perlman-rbridge-01
Title: RBridges: Transparent Routing
State: Active
Authors: Radia Perlman
Group: Individual Submissions (none)
Date: 2004-07-20
This design provides the ability to have an entire campus, with multiple
physical links, look to IP like a single subnet. This allows zero
configuration of the switches within the campus, and allows nodes to move
around within the campus without changing IP addresses. This capability is
often provided today with bridges. Bridges do accomplish this goal.
However, bridges have disadvantages: routing is confined to a spanning tree
(precluding pair-wise shortest paths), the header on which the spanning
tree forwards has no hop count, spanning tree forwarding in the presence of
temporary loops spawns exponential copies of packets, nodes can have only a
single point of attachment, and the spanning tree, in order to avoid
temporary loops, is slow to start forwarding on new ports. The design in
this paper avoids these disadvantages of bridges while maintaining the
advantages. This design works for both IPv4 and IPv6. This document is a
work in progress; we invite you to participate on the rbridge mailing list
at http://www.postel.org/rbridge
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