Adaptive Root Election for Multiple Spanning Trees of Ethernet VLANs

The root switch of an Ethernet spanning tree is elected based on the priority values and MAC addresses of the switches. When an Ethernet network consists of multiple VLANs, the spanning trees of different VLANs may elect the same root switch due to the lack of adaptability and overload the root switch by their traffic. In this paper, we propose a scheme, adaptive root election, to automatically assign different switches as root switches. The simulation results show that our scheme can effectively reduce the number of root switches undertaken by a switch.