Do Industrial Ethernet Switches Add Lag?

Essentially, the answer to the question “Do Industrial Ethernet Switch Add Lag?” is “it depends.” There are a number of factors that affect this answer. The first of these is the latency of an Ethernet frame. This refers to the amount of time it takes for an Ethernet frame to get from a receiving port to a transmitting port. Latency is typically measured in “us” (also known as microseconds). A typical switch with 10Mbps ports will have about 30 us of latency. In general, the lower the value, the better. Similarly, an expensive switch will typically have lower latency than a cheaper one.

Link Aggregation Group (LAG)

Industrial PoE switch add link aggregation groups (LAGs) to the ports in the network to share traffic. Each LAG has a different priority. Dynamic LAGs have a lower priority than static LAGs and can have up to 16 ports, whereas static LAGs have only one.

Link aggregation can help increase network performance and ensure that the speed of network traffic is higher than the speed of single links. By distributing Ethernet frames across multiple physical links, link aggregation can increase the potential data throughput. However, some devices do not allow for LAGs to be bigger than eight.

EtherChannel (Cisco)

Industrial Network Switch are useful if you want to maintain the full capacity of your network in the event that one link fails. They are also useful for long cable runs. Ethernet switches use different types of MACs to protect individual links. The src-mac and dst-mac are two types of MACs used for load balancing. The src-mac will classify the traffic into a single flow, while the dst-mac will allocate traffic to a single link.

Ethernet switches learn which segments of the network they are connected to by looking at the source addresses of Ethernet devices. Each frame sent to the switch contains two addresses – the source address and the destination address. The switch will then use this information to build a forwarding database, which will indicate which stations can access the network on which ports.

Link Balancing Algorithm

Ethernet switches can use various link balancing algorithms to ensure that traffic is balanced among ports. The spanning tree protocol is one of them. It uses Ethernet links with different weights to establish a tree. The nonroot switches then determine which port is the root and what is the shortest path to it.

In this method, traffic is balanced based on the shortest path between two ports. The algorithm is applied to all ports that belong to a LAG. Its advantage is that it ensures uninterrupted flow. Its drawback is that it does not consider port load or queue size. In addition, the algorithm only applies to incoming EtherTypes. Also, it does not distinguish between Layer 2 and Layer 3 link aggregation group bundles. This causes link utilisation to be less than optimal.

Forwarding State

Ethernet switches are categorized into three states: blocking, listening, and forwarding. A switch’s forwarding state refers to the state of the interface in which it is actively listening and responding to network management messages. The forwarding state is active while the non-forwarding state is idle. Ports stay in the forwarding state until they are changed to a different state by changing the topology of the network or by adding a new switch or bridge. This process is known as convergence.

When the Forwarding state of an Ethernet switch is set to “forward,” the switch will not forward a frame to a station that is not in its forwarding database. If a station has more than one port, the switch will not forward a frame unless it can find the address on the other port.