User’s Manual of IGS-20040MT
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802.1Q VLAN Tags
The figure below shows the 802.1Q VLAN tag. There are four additional octets inserted after the source MAC address. Their
presence is indicated by a value of
0x8100
in the Ether Type field. When a packet's Ether Type field is equal to 0x8100, the
packet carries the IEEE 802.1Q/802.1p tag. The tag is contained in the following two octets and consists of 3 bits of user priority,
1 bit of Canonical Format Identifier (CFI - used for encapsulating Token Ring packets so they can be carried across Ethernet
backbones), and 12 bits of
VLAN ID (VID)
. The 3 bits of user priority are used by 802.1p. The VID is the VLAN identifier and is
used by the 802.1Q standard. Because the VID is 12 bits long, 4094 unique VLAN can be identified.
The tag is inserted into the packet header making the entire packet longer by 4 octets. All of the information originally contained
in the packet is retained.
802.1Q Tag
User Priority
CFI
VLAN ID (VID)
3 bits
1 bit
12 bits
TPID (Tag Protocol Identifier)
TCI (Tag Control Information)
2
bytes 2
bytes
Preamble Destination
Address
Source
Address
VLAN TAG
Ethernet
Type
Data FCS
6 bytes
6 bytes
4 bytes
2 bytes
46-1500 bytes
4 bytes
The Ether Type and VLAN ID are inserted after the MAC source address, but before the original Ether Type/Length or Logical
Link Control. Because the packet is now a bit longer than it was originally, the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) must be
recalculated.
Adding an IEEE802.1Q Tag
Dest. Addr.
Src. Addr.
Length/E. type
Data
Old CRC
Dest. Addr.
Src. Addr.
E. type
Tag
Length/E. type
Data
New CRC
Priority
CFI
VLAN ID
New Tagged Packet
Original Ethernet
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Port VLAN ID
Packets that are tagged (are carrying the 802.1Q VID information) can be transmitted from one 802.1Q compliant network
device to another with the VLAN information intact. This allows 802.1Q VLAN to span network devices (and indeed, the entire
network – if all network devices are 802.1Q compliant).
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