IEEE 802.1aq in a Nutshell: Antecedents and Technology
David Allan, Nigel Bragg · 2012
The Enterprise Local Area Network (LAN) is the traditional Ethernet domain. However, Ethernet has throughout its history widened the range of applications and markets that it could address. Now it is increasingly being equipped to address the provider space, which has significantly different requirements, notably the capability to virtualize large numbers of services to run on common infrastructure. These requirements were the initial motivation for IEEE 802.1aq-shortest path bridging (SPB). The elimination of signaling and the integration of service knowledge into a single control plane radically simplify the control structure, collapse the number of steps to network convergence, and eliminate race conditions between control protocols. The chapter also introduces the information model used by SPB and summarizes the extensions to IS - IS required. The challenges of using a simple shortest path computation involve ensuring that both unicast and multicast traffic are kept on the same shortest path. Controlled Vocabulary Terms local area networks