Abstract
A bridged local area network (BLAN) is an internetwork where a lot of LANs and MANs are interconnected via bridges. The active spanning tree topology of a BLAN is to ensure that one and only one active routing path exists between each pair of end stations to resolve the frame duplication problem. A LAN is a hot-spot LAN if it has a large amount of communicating traffic load compared to other LANs. In this paper, we propose a distributed spanning tree algorithm for a BLAN with hot-spot traffic. The spanning tree constructed by our algorithm is logically rooted at the hot-spot LAN instead of the bridge with the smallest identifier. Such a spanning tree will be more practical and suitable for delivering the inter-LAN frames, and hence will obtain a better performance on end-to-end transmission delay. The effectiveness of the algorithm is evaluated by simulations. From the simulation results, we found that, compared to the standard spanning tree algorithm, the spanning tree constructed by our algorithm obtains a greater improvement in terms of end-to-end transmission delay as the traffic concentration becomes more pronounced. © 1995.