Posts Tagged: "Radia Perlman"

While the history of Internet development involves many names and was not reliant on a single discovery, it is also true that certain innovations have done more to enable better networks for all. It is with that idea in mind that we’d like to profile the achievements made by Radia Perlman, the inventor of spanning tree protocol (STP) and a 2016 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Thanks to spanning tree protocol, switched network environments are capable of connecting bridges and switches with multiple paths for data transmission redundancies without those redundancies causing a network loop, which can seriously degrade network service. Without STP, a single frame looping on an Ethernet network would create out of control data traffic that would prevent communications of all other data. February 4th marks the 24th anniversary of the issue of the U.S. patent protecting spanning tree protocol.