Bounded latency spanning tree reconfiguration

One of the main obstacles to the adoption of Ethernet technology in carrier-grade metropolitan and wide-area networks is the large recovery latency, in case of failure, due to spanning tree reconfiguration. In this paper we present a technique called Bounded Latency Spanning Tree Reconfiguration (BLSTR), which guarantees worst case recovery latency in the case of single faults by adopting a time-bounded bridge port reconfiguration mechanism and by eliminating the bandwidth-consuming station discovery phase that follows reconfiguration. BLSTR does not replace the Rapid and Multiple Spanning Tree reconfiguration protocols, which remain in control of network reconfiguration, whereas it operates in parallel with them.