EXP Computer S200 manual Bridge Filtering, What is It? How Filtering is Used

Bridge Filtering

Bridge Filtering

What is It?

How Filtering is Used

Bridge filtering prevents extraneous traffic from traversing the WAN and stops the unintentional proliferation of traffic onto other remote LAN segments.

In Ethernet Transparent Bridging, the broadcast feature lets stations determine routes to other end stations. Broadcasting to the entire network can unnecessarily degrade performance because of broadcasts traversing LAN segments that are not in any part of the network where the target station resides.

Therefore, you can use bridge filtering methods such as MAC Address Filtering, Protocol Filtering, and NetBIOS Name Filtering to control broadcast traffic and reduce overhead.

Filtering is used to:

•Reduce unnecessary traffic affecting the performance of LAN segments. Filtering broadcasts can help to reduce this overhead.

•Control the unnecessary proliferation of application level broadcasting used on Novell and NetBIOS applications.

•Restrict access to certain LAN segments for security reasons.

•Prevent unnecessary traffic from proliferating onto the WAN where bandwidth is limited. This can help to reduce congestion and minimize delay for traffic that must cross the WAN.

•Prevent stations using a certain protocol from operating outside their intended scope. Protocol formats that are filtered include DSAP and SNAP.

You can filter the MAC address contained in a frame or a protocol. The system applies MAC address filtering first and then follows with protocol filtering if appropriate.

MAC Address filtering can be performed on either the source address or destination address.

Bridging 57

T0008-16F Release 5.2M