Changes in the Standard

Changes In The Standard

The 10-Mbps Standard Ethernet has gone through several changes before moving to the higher data rates. These changes actually opened the road to the evolution of the Ethernet to become compatible with other high-data-rate LANs.

1. Bridged Ethernet

The first step in the Ethernet evolution was the division of a LAN by bridges. Bridges have two effects on an Ethernet LAN: They raise the bandwidth and they separate collision domains.

Raising the Bandwidth

In an unbridged Ethernet network, the total capacity (10 Mbps) is shared among all stations with a frame to send; the stations share the bandwidth of the network. If only one station has frames to send, it benefits from the total capacity (10 Mbps). But if more than one station needs to use the network, the capacity is shared. For example, if two stations have a lot of frames to send, they probably alternate in usage. When one station is sending, the other one refrains from sending.

A bridge divides the network into two or more networks. Bandwidth-wise, each network is independent. a network with 12 stations is divided into two networks, each with 6 stations. Now each network has a capacity of 10 Mbps. The 10-Mbps capacity in each segment is now shared between 6 stations (actually 7 because the bridge acts as a station in each segment), not 12 stations. In a network with a heavy load, each station theoretically is offered 10/6 Mbps instead of 10/12 Mbps, assuming that the traffic is not going through the bridge

Separating Collision Domains

Another advantage of a bridge is the separation of the collision domain. The collision domain becomes much smaller and the probability of collision is reduced tremendously. Without bridging, 12 stations contend for access to the medium; with bridging only 3 stations contend for access to the medium

2. Switched Ethernet

The idea of a bridged LAN can be extended to a switched LAN. Instead of having two to four networks. The bandwidth is shared only between the station and the switch (5 Mbps each). In addition, the collision domain is divided into N domains. A layer 2 switch is an N-port bridge with additional sophistication that allows faster handling of the packets. Evolution from a bridged Ethernet to a switched Ethernet was a big step that opened the way to an even faster Ethernet.

3. Full-Duplex Ethernet

One of the limitations of 10Base5 and l0Base2 is that communication is half-duplex, a station can either send or receive, but may not do both at the same time. The next step in the evolution was to move from switched Ethernet to full-duplex switched Ethernet. The full-duplex mode increases the capacity of each domain from 10 to 20 Mbps.