DESCRIPTION OF SOFTWARE FEATURES

Store-and-Forward Switching – The switch copies each frame into its memory before forwarding them to another port. This ensures that all frames are a standard Ethernet size and have been verified for accuracy with the cyclic redundancy check (CRC). This prevents bad frames from entering the network and wasting bandwidth.

To avoid dropping frames on congested ports, the switch provides 8 MB for frame buffering. This buffer can queue packets awaiting transmission on congested networks.

Spanning Tree Algorithm – The switch supports these spanning tree protocols:

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP, IEEE 802.1D) – This protocol provides loop detection and recovery by allowing two or more redundant connections to be created between a pair of LAN segments. When there are multiple physical paths between segments, this protocol will choose a single path and disable all others to ensure that only one route exists between any two stations on the network. This prevents the creation of network loops. However, if the chosen path should fail for any reason, an alternate path will be activated to maintain the connection.

Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP, IEEE 802.1w) – This protocol reduces the convergence time for network topology changes to 3 to 5 seconds, compared to 30 seconds or more for the older IEEE 802.1D STP standard. It is intended as a complete replacement for STP, but can still interoperate with switches running the older standard by automatically reconfiguring ports to STP-compliant mode if they detect STP protocol messages from attached devices.

Virtual LANs – The switch supports up to 255 VLANs. A Virtual LAN is a collection of network nodes that share the same collision domain regardless of their physical location or connection point in the network. The switch supports tagged VLANs based on the IEEE 802.1Q standard. Members of VLAN groups can be dynamically learned via GVRP, or ports can be manually assigned to a specific set of VLANs. This allows the

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SMC Networks SMC6224M manual Description of Software Features
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