DBridges: Flexible floodless frame forwarding

In this paper, we present DBridges, an efficient solution for building large-scale Ethernets based on the IETF-driven RBridges and SEATTLE. DBridges provide loop-safety, dramatic decrease in broadcast traffic, and resiliency and graceful failover without affecting the plug-and-play vision of Ethernet. The key contributions of our solution are that we are backward compatible with RBridges and can support incremental deployment. We analyze and show these benefits in detail, and present various performance measurements using our proof-of-concept implementation. We estimate that with DBridges it is possible to increase the size of Ethernet broadcast domains at least tenfold.