TECHNIQUE FOR BRIDGING LOCAL AREA NETWORKS HAVING NON-UNIQUE NODE ADDRESSES.

摘要

A bridging apparatus provides the capability of transparently and unambiguously communicating LAN packets between two separate LAN segments which have nodes with duplicate IDs. A communicator connected to each LAN segment includes a controller which aliases the source identification (SID) of remotely originated or sourced LAN packets with an unused ID which is an alias (AID) before sending the LAN packet with the AID as its SID on the local LAN segment. The reverse occurs in response to locally sourced LAN packets containing the AID as the DID. The ID of the remote node which correlates to the AID is substituted as the DID before the LAN packet is transmitted to the remote LAN segment. By aliasing in this manner LAN packets are communicated by use of the AIDs between the nodes having the duplicate IDs on the two LAN segments without changing the LAN protocol. Each communicator preferably includes a transmitter and receiver by which to communicate bridge packets between communicators. The LAN packets are encapsulated in the bridge packets. Unique communicator source and destination identifications are included in each bridge packet to form a tuple which uniquely identifies each node in the Group without regard to the duplicate IDs on the separate LAN segments.