An FDDI bridge for the high-speed multimedia backbone LAN

An architecture for a high-performance bridge that interconnects the fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) ring and the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology based high-speed multimedia backbone LAN (MBLAN) is proposed. This bridge architecture enables the FDDI bridge to learn the source terminal address efficiently by selecting the error-free cell in which the source terminal address is contained, instead of receiving the whole FDDI frame. The fast filtering-database access technique, which applies a multiple hashing algorithm, has high flexibility: that is, both the entry search speed and an effective number of entries in the entry table can be adapted to the requirements of an application by changing the maximum number of hashing times. Both the proposed architecture and the fast filtering-database access technique can be applied to any bridges, the media access method of which handles a fixed-length packet. The MBLAN provides data transmission, as well as voice and video transmission, and is under development