What Will the Bridge Do? — TechKnowSurge

About this interactive

The lesson's bridge, between two hubs: - **Learning:** every frame carries its source MAC address. The bridge records that address against the port the frame came in on. The result is the bridging table, also called the MAC address table. - **Forwarding:** for each frame, the bridge reads the destination MAC address. If the table puts the destination on the port the frame came in on, the frame stays on that side. If it is on the other port, the bridge forwards it out that port. - **Two collision domains:** a collision on one side does not reach the other, and two devices on different sides never collide with each other. It reads Layer 2 information for both jobs, so it is a Layer 2 device.

What you'll learn

Predict, from a bridge's MAC address table, whether it forwards a frame to the other segment or keeps it on its own side
Predict the entry a bridge learns from a frame (the source MAC address and the port it arrived on), and that a bridge splits one network into two collision domains

Aligned to

CompTIA Network+

1.2 Compare and contrast networking appliances, applications, and functions.

Cisco CCNA

1.13 Describe switching concepts

Key terms

Bridge: A network device that connects two or more network segments and filters traffic based on MAC addresses.
MAC Address Table: A table maintained by a switch (also called the CAM table) that maps source MAC addresses to the switch ports on which those devices were learned. When a frame arrives, the switch looks up the destination MAC in this table to forward it out only the correct port rather than flooding all ports.
Collision Domain: A network segment where data packets can collide with each other when transmitted simultaneously.
Media Access Control: A sublayer of the Data Link layer that controls how devices on a network gain access to a medium and transmit data.
Frame: The unit of data used at Layer 2 (Data Link layer) of the OSI model, containing source and destination MAC addresses, a payload (the encapsulated Layer 3 packet), and a frame check sequence for error detection. Frames are how switches and other Layer 2 devices think about and forward data.

Topics

Bridge Mac Address Table Collision Domain Layer 2 Interactive Predict

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