King-Shan Lui
kinglui@uiuc.edu
http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~kinglui/


Title: Spanning Tree Alternate Routing Bridge Protocol

Abstract:
Bridges are devices for connecting local area networks (LANs)
together to form a transparent extended LAN.  As home networking
technology advances, bridges will be used to connect multiple
home network segments at home.  In the IEEE 802.1D
standard for bridges, a spanning tree is built among bridges for
loop-free frame forwarding.  Although this approach is simple, it does
not support all-pair shortest paths.  We present a novel bridge
protocol that attempts to find alternate paths that are shorter than
their corresponding tree paths on the standard spanning tree.
The protocol is backward compatible with the IEEE 802.1D
standard and enhances path performance by replacing
only a few bridges in an extended LAN.  The protocol has a
complexity that is comparable to that of the standard and other
existing protocols.