Perle Systems IOLINK-520 manual Aging Timer, Address Purging

Introduction

Forwarding Unknown Destination Addresses

When a frame is received from a LAN segment with an unknown destination address (an address that does not yet exist in the filter table), the bridge will forward the frame to the other segment, logging the address, and marking the location as “unknown”.

Unknown Location Update

When the receiving station transmits a frame in the opposite direction, the bridge will now see the previously unknown destination address in the source address field. It will now process this source address as it did during the initial learning stage, adding the location to the address entry.

In this fashion (looking at source addresses of non-local packets), the bridge learns about non-local stations and their associated arrival ports. The bridge then updates the location of each address in its table. In the future the bridge will look up these stored non-local addresses to determine the bridge port on which to forward a packet destined for a known non-local station.

In summary, the IOLINK router will “learn” the location of a station by examining the source Ethernet address, and will “filter” frames based on destination address. A frame received from one segment that is of “unknown” location will be forwarded to the other segment. A frame that is received with a source address equal to a known address, but previously marked as an unknown location, will be updated in the filter table to add the location.

Aging Timer

During the bridging process, the filter table is built giving the location (bridge port or LAN segment) of known Ethernet addresses. The table would become quite large, eventually reducing performance, if stations were added, removed, or moved without the old information being purged periodically. Performance is affected since the larger the table, the more time it will take to process an incoming frame.

This purging process, called “aging,” is an integral part of the learning function. It limits the size of the filter table and ensure that performance is not reduced unnecessarily.

Aging assumes that many of the addresses may not be active all of the time, and could be purged after a specified interval to keep the size of the filter table small. In general terms, the smaller the table, the higher the performance.

Address Purging

To achieve this routine housekeeping, each entry in the filter table contains the LAN addresses, the LAN port identifier, and a timer flag. Each time a particular address is looked up or added to the table, a timer flag is set for the “fresh” entry. When a time interval, defined by the Bridge/Router Manager expires, the address table is scanned and any “stale” entries that have not been used since the timer expired are removed. This timer is called the “aging timer” and may be controlled through the bridge options.

Purging the address does not prevent the station from using the bridging facilities, since the location of the station may be re-learned. However, since a small aging timer value will mean that the bridge must re-learn addresses more often, there must be a balance between table size and aging time to achieve optimal performance.

1.14— IOLINK-PRO & 520 Reference Manual