A SIMPLE ALGORITHM TO FIND THE PROPER SPANNING TREE IN METRO ETHERNET NETWORKS

IEEE Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is a layer-2 protocol which ensures a loop free topology in Ethernet networks. In STP, there isn't any traffic engineering mechanism for load balancing. This results in uneven load distribution and bottlenecks, especially close to the root. In our previous work, we proposed an algorithm named Best Spanning Tree (BST) to find the best load-balanced spanning tree in a Metro Ethernet network. Although, BST algorithm is an exhaustive search algorithm that finds the Best (Optimal) spanning tree, but it is very time consuming especially when our network size is large. In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm to find the near-optimal Spanning Tree to reduce the computational complexity of BST algorithm.