06 Ethernet LAN Switching Concepts

By Muhammad Asghar Khan

Reference: CCENT/CCNA ICND1 Official Exam Certification Guide By Wendell Odom

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Agenda

Progression from Hub, Bridges & Switches Switching Logic

Processing on Cisco Switches

LAN Design Consideration

Choice of using Hub, Switch or Router Virtual LANs (VLAN) Campus LAN Design Terminology Ethernet LAN Media & Cable Lengths

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Progression from Hub, to Bridge, to Switch

10Base 2 & 10Base 5

Ethernet started with standard that used physical bus created with coaxial cabling (10Base 2 & 10Base 5) These standards were vulnerable to single point of failure

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Progression from Hub, to Bridge, to Switch

10Base T

Next came the 10Base-T Ethernet, it allowed for the use of UTP cabling, and a shared hub, removed single point of failure But still a single device can send at a time as:

A collision still occur A broadcast is heard by all devices

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Progression from Hub, to Bridge, to Switch

In 10Base T network starts suffering from collision, to reduce it bridges were added, bridge create a separate collision domain, thus doubled the bandwidth of the 10BaseT network

10BASE-T Network Segmented Using a Bridge 10BASE-T Network before Adding a Bridge

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Progression from Hub, to Bridge, to Switch

LAN switches perform the same basic functions of bridges Like bridges, switches segment a LAN into separate parts, with separate collision domain Switches have potentially large numbers of interfaces, with optimized hardware Each interface creates a separate collision domain, thus switch multiply the available bandwidth One collision domain per interface is called microsegmentation Figure on next slide shows, all interfaces are running at 100 Mbps, with four collision domains. Note each interface also uses full duplex
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Progression from Hub, to Bridge, to Switch

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Switching Logic

Switching logic is based on the source & destination MAC address in each frames Ethernet address IEEE defines three categories of Ethernet MAC addresses:

Unicast address; identify a single LAN interface Broadcast address (FFFF:FFFF:FFFF); implies all devices on the LAN should receive the frame Multicast address; all dynamic subset of devices on a LAN to communicate

Switch uses the dynamic built table that lists MAC addresses & outgoing interfaces MAC address table is also called switching table or bridging table or even Content Addressable Memory (CAM)
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Switching Logic

The three main actions performed by the switch are:

Step 1: To decide when to forward a frame or when to filter a frame, based on destination MAC address a) If the destination address is a broadcast, multicast, or unknown destination unicast (not listed in the MAC table), the switch floods the frame b) If the destination address is a known unicast address (found in the MAC table):
i.

ii.

If the outgoing interface listed in the MAC address table is different from the interface in which the frame was received, the switch forwards the frame out the outgoing interface If the outgoing interface is the same as the interface in which the frame was received, the switch filters the frame, meaning that the switch simply ignores the frame and does not forward it
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Switching Logic

Figures below depicts the point (b)of previous slide

Switch Forwarding Decision

Switch Filtering Decision

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Switching Logic

Step 2: To learn MAC addresses by examining the source MAC address of each frame a) For each received frame, examine the source MAC address and note the interface from which the frame was received b) If they are not already in the table, add the address and interface, setting the inactivity timer to 0 c) If it is already in the table, reset the inactivity timer for the entry to 0 Step 3: Switches use Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) to prevent loops by causing some interfaces to block, meaning that they do not send or receive frames
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Switching Logic

Processing on Cisco Switches

Almost all recently released switches use store-andforward processing Cisco switch can use a couple of different types of internal processing variations Because the destination MAC address occurs very early in the Ethernet header, a switch can make a forwarding decision long before the switch has received all the bits in the frames Based on this logic Cisco offers two other internal processing methods for switches:

Cut-Through Fragment-Free
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Switching Logic

Cut-Through

With cut-through processing, the switch starts sending the frame out the output port as soon as possible This reduce latency, but also propagates frames with errors as FCS is in the Ethernet trailer

Fragment-Free

Works like cut-through logic, but it wait to receive the first 64 bytes before forwarding a frame First 64 bytes are considered due to the fact that CSMA/CD logic detects a collision in the first 64 bytes of a frame This has less latency then with store-and-forward logic and slightly more latency than with cut-through Also frames with errors as a result of collisions are not forwarded
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Switching Logic

With high speed links and faster application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC), todays switches typically use store-and-forward processing, bcz the improved latency of the cut-through and fragment-free is negligible at these speeds Table below summarizes the switch internal processing

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LAN Design Consideration

Here we take a broader look at how to design medium to large LAN When building a medium to large LAN, you have more product choices to make:

Such as when to use hubs, switches, and routers Which LAN switch to choose (switches vary in size, number of ports, performance, features, and price) Decide to choice the UTP cabling or fiber optic cabling option

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LAN Design Consideration

Choice of using Hub, Switch or Router

The terms collision domain and broadcast domain define two important effects of the process of segmenting LANs using various devices The goal is to define how hubs, switches, and routers impact collision domains and broadcast domains Collision Domains

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A collision domain is the set of LAN interfaces whose frames could collide with each other, but not with frames sent by any other devices in the network Figure on next slide illustrtes collision domains
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LAN Design Consideration

Each separate segment, or collision domain, is shown with a dashed-line circle in the figure The switch on the right separates the LAN into different collision domains for each port Both bridges and routers also separate LANs into different collision domains Hub near the center of the network does not create multiple collision domains for each interface

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LAN Design Consideration

Broadcast Domains

A broadcast domain encompasses a set of devices for which, when one of the devices sends a broadcast, all the other devices receive a copy of the broadcast Figure depicts the broadcast domains

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LAN Design Consideration

Router does not forward a LAN broadcast sent by a PC on the left to the network segment on the right Thats is why routers are sometime called broadcast firewall Switches create a single broadcast domain, as switches flood broadcasts and multicasts on all ports

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LAN Design Consideration

Use switch instead of hubs , to create different collision domains and there by enabling the full duplex communication Broadcasts happen, as all hosts need to send some broadcast to function properly (e.g. IP ARP messages), but broadcast do require all the hosts to spend time processing each broadcast frame But if 500 PCs connected to switches, the broadcast could start to impact the performance of the enduser PCs

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LAN Design Consideration

However, a design that separated the 500 PCs into five groups of 100, separated from each other by router, would create five broadcast domains, and thus improves performance Smaller broadcast domains also improve security due to robust security features in routers Table lists the benefits of segmenting Ethernet devices using hubs, switches and routers

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LAN Design Consideration

Virtual LANs (VLAN)

A LAN consists of all devices in the same broadcast domain With VLANs configuration, a switch can put some interfaces into one broadcast domain and some into another These individual broadcast domains created by the switch are called virtual LANs Figure shows sample network with two broadcast domains, two switches & no VLANs
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LAN Design Consideration

Alternately, you can create multiple broadcast domains using a single switch Figure shows the same two broadcast domains as in previous slide figure, now implemented as two different VLANs on single switch You may also need to use VLAN:

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To group users by department To reduce workload for STP To enforce security, by limiting sensitive data users to separate VLAN To separate traffic from IP phone from traffic sent by PC
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LAN Design Consideration

Campus LAN Design Terminology

The term campus LAN refers to the LAN created to support larger buildings, or multiple buildings in somewhat close proximity to one another When planning and designing a campus LAN, the engineers must consider the types of Ethernet available and the cabling lengths supported by each type Also the engineer must consider the type of equipment that is already installed and whether an increase in speed on some segments is worth the cost of buying new equipment
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LAN Design Consideration

Cisco-oriented LAN designs use some common terminology to refer to the design Figure shows a typical design of a large campus LAN, with the terminology included in the figure

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LAN Design Consideration

Cisco uses three terms to describe the role of each switch in a campus design:

Access Distribution , and Core

Access switches connect directly to end users, providing access to the LAN Access switches should not be expected to forward traffic between two other switches Access switches tend to be smaller and less expensive Each of the access switches must use at least two uplinks to two different distribution switches for redundancy
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Access Switches

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LAN Design Consideration

Distribution Switches

Distribution switches provides an aggregation point for access switches, forwarding frames between switches, but not connecting directly to end-user devices It provides some cabling advantages and potential performance advantages, e.g. for 30 access layer switches to be cabled directly, the LAN would need 435 cables. Instead, by connecting each 30 access switches to two distribution switches, requires 60 cables Switches with faster forwarding rates and with two uplinks from each access switch to the distribution switch has more availability
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LAN Design Consideration

Core Switches

Core switches aggregates distribution switches in very large campus LANs Core switches provide extremely high forwarding ratesthese days into the hundreds of millions of frames per second Medium to smaller campus LANs often forego the concept of core switches

Ethernet LAN Media & Cable Lengths

An engineer must consider the length of each cable run and then find the best type of Ethernet and cabling type that supports that length of cable
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LAN Design Consideration

The three most common types of Ethernet today (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, and 1000BASE-T) have the same 100-meter cable restriction, but they use lightly different cables Several types of Ethernet define the use of fiber-optic cables Optical cables support a variety of much longer distances than the 100 meters supported by Ethernet on UTP cables Switches can use lasers to generate the light, as well as light-emitting diodes (LED) The maximum distances of optical cable (single-mode or multimode) is dependent up on the use of laser switches (often with single-mode fiber)or LED switches (often with multimode fiber)
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LAN Design Consideration

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Table lists the more common types of Ethernet and their cable types and length limitations Most engineers simply remember the general distance limitations and then use a reference chart (such as the table ) to remember each specific detail www.asghars.blogspot.com