SELF-CONFIGURING SOURCE-AWARE BRIDGING FOR NOISY MEDIA

摘要

A source-aware bridging scheme for supporting bridging between an unreliable network (626) and reliable network (624). Each device connected to the medium (642) of the unreliable network includes a source-aware MAC (652) that maintains BPDAlist information, a BPDAlist (666) in each station (640) and a BPDAlist (668) in a bridge (630). The bridge serves as a proxy with respect to the destination addresses and thus maintains its own list of the destination addresses and thus maintains its own list of the destination addresses for which it serves as proxy or IAPlist (664). If the device receives a frame intended for transmit and the destination address is a bridged address, the destination address is replaced with the appropriate bridge address and the frame is encapsulated with bridge information that enables the bridge reconstruct the original frame. If the device a bridge, the source address is replaced with the address of the bridge and the IAPlist is updated with the source address.