A Scheme for High-Performance LAN Interconnection Across Public MAN's

The proliferation of local area networks (LAN's) and the emergence of high-bandwidth public networks will create a new environment, in which it will become increasingly simple and attractive to communicate among different organizations across a common public networking infrastructure. The Open Bridging scheme proposed in this paper employs inherent features of forthcoming cell-based metropolitan area networks (MAN's) in order to achieve efficient interenterprise communications. It uses enhanced remote LAN bridging techniques to ensure router-level functionality with bridge-level simplicity and performance. The practicality of Open Bridging is shown by describing how it can be incorporated in networks using current standard protocol stacks, such as OSI and TCP/IP. © 1993 IEEE