Interconnection of broadband local area networks

Abstract
Interconnection of multiple broadband local area networks to form an integrated packet transport system presents several challenges. To take full advantage of broadband systems, assignment of nodes to channels must be dynamic, leading to the use of a flat address space. Combined with the desire to avoid reliance on a central server or complex routing in packet forwarders, this addressing scheme leads to adoption of a controlled flooding technique to “discover” the best path to a destination node. This discovery procedure sets up a path through internetwork forwarders for use by subsequent packets to the same destination. This paper describes the design and implementation of such a technique in Sytek's LocalNet(TM) systems along with several refinements which increase performance and keep the worst case load for route discovery below a few percent of network capacity.