METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR ACHIEVING SPATIAL REUSE OVER A RESILIENT PACKET RING

摘要

A system, method and/or station that provides for spatial reuse over a resilient packet ring (RPR) network. A sublayer in a station on an RPR network tracks associations between MAC addresses of bridges on the RPR network and remote addresses in an association database. Frames addressed to a remote destination may be sent directly to the associated MAC address. A sending station uses an extended frame format for sending frames to remote addresses. If the association database in the sending station specifies an associated bridge MAC address local to the RPR network then the extended frame is addressed to the specified MAC address and flooding is disabled. If there is no association in the database, then the sending station uses a reserved group address and floods the RPR network. The sublayer 'learns' associations based upon frames received from stations that also have a spatially aware sublayer.