Simple Protocol Enhancements of Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol over Ring Topologies

The paper addresses resilience over Ethernet networks using the Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP). The topic constitutes an open issue of debate as clear indications on the real RSTP performance can hardly be found from the literature. Actually, the complicated protocol structure makes the analysis intricate and unsuitable for generalization. Moreover, the presence of other resilience algorithms, whose mechanisms and rules are explicitly designed for resilience, solves the problem beyond the application of RSTP. Even though those solutions are actually more efficient than RSTP, they are more expensive. In this perspective, the purposes of this paper are to critically evaluate the intrinsic limitations of RSTP and propose some simple protocol modifications to speed up its performance. The analysis validates the achievable performance as a trade-off between fast reactions and bandwidth overhead.