SMC Networks SMC6724L3 manual Description of Software Features

DESCRIPTION OF SOFTWARE FEATURES

IP Routing – The switch provides Layer 3 IP routing. To maintain a high rate of throughput, the switch forwards all traffic passing within the same segment, and routes only traffic that passes between different subnetworks. The wire-speed routing provided by this switch lets you easily link network segments or VLANs together without having to deal with the bottlenecks or configuration hassles normally associated with conventional routers.

Routing for unicast traffic is supported with the Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol.

RIP – This protocol uses a distance-vector approach to routing. Routes are determined on the basis of minimizing the distance vector, or hop count, which serves as a rough estimate of transmission cost.

OSPF – This approach uses a link state routing protocol to generate a shortest-path tree, then builds up its routing table based on this tree. OSPF produces a more stable network because the participating routers act on network changes predictably and simultaneously, converging on the best route more quickly than RIP.

Address Resolution Protocol – The switch uses ARP and Proxy ARP to convert between IP addresses and MAC (i.e., hardware) addresses. This switch supports conventional ARP, which locates the MAC address corresponding to a given IP address. This allows the switch to use IP addresses for routing decisions and the corresponding MAC addresses to forward packets from one hop to the next. You can configure either static or dynamic entries in the ARP cache.

Proxy ARP allows hosts that do not support routing to determine the MAC address of a device on another network or subnet. When a host sends an ARP request for a remote network, the switch checks to see if it has the best route. If it does, it sends its own MAC address to the host. The host then sends traffic for the remote destination via the switch, which uses its own routing table to reach the destination on the other network.

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