A New Algorithm for Physical Topology Discovery Based on STP and AFT

Discovering the Ethernet's topology is very important for the network management. The way based on STP and the way based on AFT are the two main ways to do it. But they both have some shortcomings when we do the discovering only by one of them. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm Based on the two ways to discover the topology in the LAN which will perform better. When there are switches which support STP and don't support STP, the result of our experiment demonstrate that our algorithm will be faster and more accurate than the traditional ways.