An Effective Solution to Reduce Count-to-Infinity Problem in Ethernet
Ethernet is currently the most popular networking technology
because of its high performance, low cost and ubiquity nature.
Ethernets rely on the dynamic computation of a cycle-free
active forwarding topology. For that it uses rapid spanning
tree protocol. Unfortunately, it exhibits count-to-infinity
problem that may lead to forwarding loops under certain
network failures. These consequences are considered serious
since network can become highly congested and even packet
forwarding can fail. In this work, a simple and effective
solution to reduce count-to-infinity problem, called RSTP with
epochs is proposed. This eliminates the count-to-infinity
induced forwarding loop and improves the convergence time.
Keywords: count-to-infinity, Ethernet, spanning tree protocols
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