Wilan VIP 110-24, Operator'S Manual

Page: 23 / 101

VIP 110-24 Operator’s Manual (rev E)
- 16 -
3. If the destination address is unknown, “flood” the packet into the VINE network. The packet will
show up at every LAN connected to any radio in the VINE.
Each VIP 110-24 has capacity to store 500 entries in its Ethernet table. Entries are erased after a
certain amount of time to allow for stations to be moved between LANs and not show up in two
distinct LANs. The user can control this time-out with the “ethernet” command. If the table ever gets
full, entries that have been least used are erased to make room for new entries.
Bridging has two major advantages over routing:
1. There is absolutely no configuration required. The VIP 110-24 learns about all stations
automatically and routes the packets appropriately.
2. All layer 3 protocols (IP, IPX or others) can be bridged.
3.7 Quality of Service
The VINE protocol is ideal for bursty traffic that is typical in data communications. The available
data throughput is allocated on demand to the nodes that are “active”. If the network gets congested,
there are different QoS (Quality of Service) parameters that allow the network manager to give
priority to certain nodes. Nodes with a “committed information rate” (CIR) will always have access
to the committed bandwidth. When those nodes are not using their committed bandwidth, it becomes
available to be shared among all nodes. The unique VINE flow control mechanism adaptively shares
this excess bandwidth equally among all active nodes without a CIR.
In an Internet Access application, one of the nodes is connected to the wired Internet. In a VINE
network this node is designated as the “anchor”, and it is where a large majority of the traffic will
originate and converge. For these applications it is typically desirable (but not required) to make the
root node the anchor.