Source routing requires that the source station knows a route to the destination. The paper presents a new bridge protocol for route discovery in multiple-ring net- works, where several token-rings are connected by bridges. The protocol gives to the source station an indication of the availability of a route to the destination. If such a route exists, the source is supplied with a description - a list of ring and bridge identities - of the route that is fastest at the time of protocol execution. The main advantage of the new route discovery protocol over the existing one is its communication efficiency: the number of frames used is the sum of the number of rings and number of bridges in the network, as opposed to the exponential function re- quired in the existing protocol. Another advantage of the new protocol is its option that allows determining routes to multiple destinations, thus supporting efficient multicast source routing.
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