Virtual LAN as a Network Control Mechanism

Modern Ethernet switches, even low-end ones, come with various advanced features such as IGMP snooping, VLAN, class-based traffic prioritization, host access control, etc. Most of these features can be configured either through standard SNMP commands or through normal packets. Although these features were originally designed for network provisioning at deployment time, there is no reason why they could not be used as dynamic control mechanisms at run time. In the past several years, we have been trying to leverage one of these features, VLAN, as a network resource management primitive, and apply it to Metro ethernets, storage area networks, a...