Happy Friday everyone!
Today's topic is about another hot keyword searched by you through the Community search bar heavily during last year, that is STP - the Spanning Tree Protocol.
An integrated part within the Ethernet technology, STP has been around for quite some time now, managing to amaze network engineers with its great importance. Let's find out more about STP in the following paragraphs!
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Let's watch this video first in order to familiarize ourselves better with the concept of STP:
Quite an informative material, wouldn't you say? Let us put into words the knowledge shared through it by defining the Spanning Tree Protocol. Therefore, according to the Guru99.com website, 'STP is a link management protocol designed to support redundant links that stops switching loops in the STP network. It is a Layer 2 protocol that runs on bridges and switches, which should be enabled on the switch interfaces. IEEE standardized STP protocols as IEE 802.1D'.
I know, a lot of information to take in. But let me put all that in other words: STP is a network protocol that builds a loop-free logical topology for Ethernet networks, whose basic function is to prevent bridge loops. That's more like it, right?
'LOOP' SOUNDS LIKE A FUN TERM...
... except in our case it's the opposite. They're actually harmful to the network, in the sense that when switches and LANs are interconnected using redundant links to improve resilience, loops occur and the connection fails. That's where the Spanning Tree Protocol comes in.
BENEFITS OF STP
The Spanning Tree Protocol is essential in certain network scenarios. It helps solve the switching loop occurrence in situations like:
- network fault tolerance is exponentially increased through the introduction of the redundancy;
- when the traffic must be directed to a location that's unknown yet, switches will flood the traffic out of all the ports;
- except for the port through which the traffic arrives, the broadcast and multicast traffic are forwarded out to every other port;
- whenever the need to create a loop-free logical topology from a physical one that contains loops arises.
