User's Manual

CHAPTER 7
REPEATING FEATURES
Revised: 23 Jan 08 7-2 EST P/N AA107G
Finally, enabling the link allows the corresponding 195Eg to be included in the communication routing. Mobile clients do not
require input in the repeater peer table. If multiple Mesh routes are configured, you will also need to set the values for Priority and
Path Costs (explained in Spanning Tree below). For multiple examples of repeater configurations, please refer to Chapter 5 of this
user’s manual.
SPANNING TREE PROTOCOL (STP)
The ESTeem Model 195Eg uses standard Ethernet Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) to determine the radio routing structure of the
wireless network. The primary purpose of STP is to make sure that “network loops” are not created. A network loop is having two
communication paths to the same destination where the remote device would receive the same data multiple times. If there were no
way to control the data flow, this data would be constantly passed around this loop causing a “packet storm” that would shut down
the entire network. The Spanning Tree Protocol will block all these redundant links.
The STP operation begins by determining which Ethernet device on the network will be the Root Bridge. All Ethernet networks
have a Root Bridge that is selected by the lowest MAC address. All path costs are evaluated against this Root Bridge device to
determine routing and which paths will be blocked. On a wired Ethernet network, the location of the Root Bridge is not really
important, but in a wireless network selection of the Root Bridge is critical to the wireless network routing. Let’s use one of the
Example network diagrams from Chapter 5 to continue the discussion (Figure 4).
Figure 3: Repeater Configuration Example