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Transparent bridges were first developed at Digital Equipment Corporation (Digital) in
the early 1980s. Transparent bridges are so named because their presence and operation are transparent to network hosts. When transparent bridges are powered on, they learn the workstation locations by analyzing the source address of incoming frames from all attached networks. For example, if a bridge sees a frame arrive on port 1 from Host A, the bridge concludes that Host A can be reached through the segment connected to port 1. Through this process, transparent bridges build a table. The bridge uses its table as the basis for traffic forwarding. When a frame is received on one of the bridge’s interfaces, the bridge looks up the frame’s destination address in its internal table. If the table contains an association between the destination address and any of the bridge’s ports aside from the one on which the frame was received, the frame is forwarded out the indicated port. If no association is found, the frame is flooded to all ports except the inbound port. Broadcasts and multicasts also are flooded in this way. Transparent bridges successfully isolate intrasegment traffic, thereby reducing the traffic seen on each individual segment. This is called filtering and occurs when the source and destination MAC addresses reside on the same bridge interface. Filtering usually improves network response times, as seen by the user. The extent to which traffic is reduced and response times are improved depends on the volume of intersegment traffic relative to the total traffic, as well as the volume of broadcast and multicast traffic.