STP Flavors
Loops occur when alternate routes exist between hosts. Loops in an extended network can cause Layer 2 switches to forward traffic indefinitely, resulting in increased traffic and reduced network efficiency.
STP provides a tree topology for any arrangement of Layer 2 switches and interconnecting links, creating a unique path between end stations on a network, eliminating loops.
The switch supports the following Spanning Tree Protocol versions:
- Classic STP provides a single path between any two end stations, avoiding and eliminating loops.
- Rapid STP (RSTP) detects network topologies to provide faster convergence of the spanning tree. This is most effective when the network topology is naturally tree-structured, and therefore faster convergence might be possible. RSTP is enabled by default.
Although Classic STP is guaranteed to prevent Layer 2 forwarding loops in a general network topology, there might be an unacceptable delay before convergence. This means that each bridge or switch in the network needs to decide, if it should actively forward traffic or not on each of its ports.
NOTE The 200 Series switches do not support MSTP.