An efficient VLSI network bridge architecture for local area networks

Abstract

The growth of local area networks (LANs) has raised an important issue of efficient interconnection of LANs. Network bridge was introduced to address this issue and it provides an interconnection channel between multiple independent LANs. The existing network bridge, however, is not efficient for bridging a large number of LANs because the bridging is accomplished at the cooperation of separately packaged processors in a serial fashion. In this paper, we present a new VLSI architecture which provides an efficient bridging mechanism for multiple LANs. By processing the bridge operation in parallel, in a single chip, our design achieves a few orders of magnitude speed-up compared to the traditional design. It can also be easily expanded to accommodate a large number of LANs.