Link Aggregation Control Protocol

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) is part of IEEE specification 802.3ad that allows bundling several physical ports together to form a single logical channel. LACP allows a network switch to negotiate an automatic bundle by sending LACP packets to the peer. LACP is a protocol implementation in OSI layer 2 which controls through which physical links the traffic will be routed.

[edit] Advantages

Increases bandwidth
Failover when link status fails on a port.

[edit] Practical notes

Several links can be bundled into a single logical link, enabling:

higher bandwidth connections
enhanced bandwidth granularity
load sharing
fault tolerance protection

The user may aggregate ports into link-aggregation port groups. These groups are treated as individual logical ports. Each group is composed of ports with the same speed, set to full-duplex operation.

The group is represented by a logical Aggregator which offers a standard IEEE 802.3 MAC service interface. An Aggregator can therefore be considered to be a logical MAC, bound to one or more ports.

A single, individual MAC address is associated with each Aggregator.