DLSw

This term has many meaning attached to its depending upon the perspective it is used in, however, this article will only deal with this term with respect to the networking world, and in this world, the term DLSw is short or an acronym for Data Link Switching. Data link switching is basically a tunneling protocol made on the standards mentioned by the IEEE. The Data link switching protocol as mentioned before is a tunneling protocol hence it is designed and used for tunneling the un-routable non-IP based protocols such as the IBM System Network Architecture or more commonly known as SNA and NBF over an IP network and this protocol is the most popular protocol for this job.

The invention of this protocol has made things quite simpler, easier and has reduced the operational costs. Until the invention of this protocol SRB or Source Route Bridging was used to re-route the non-IP based traffic over the IP networks and this increased the operational cost. The SRB Was the protocol that was responsible for transporting the data packets in the token ring environments.

The DLSw was initially documented in the IETF RFC 1434 in the year 1993, after that it was again documented in the year 1995 in IETF RFC 1795, this was still the first version but it had some improvements made to it. The second version of this protocol was present in the 1997 and documented in IETF RFC 2166. This second version was mostly the same as the one which was documented in the RFC 1795, but it was improved a lot to give a more efficient protocol that was capable of doing the job more efficiently.

The DLSw uses the switch to switch protocol between the routers to make a peer to peer connection, locate resources, forward data, error recover, and handle flow control. The routers that get involved in this process of DLSw are called the data link switches.