A routing strategy for MAN interconnection

The authors propose a combined routing strategy to overcome the problems connected with applying routing schemes usually adopted in bridged LANs to a LAN-MAN (metropolitan area network) internet. The strategy uses a spanning tree for multicasting within user groups, and shortest paths for point-to-point forwarding. The authors show that the algorithms can scale up efficiently to large network sizes. They also present various enhancements of the basic algorithms, which can substantially improve performance in specific environments