Network Topology Discovery Technology

It is becoming more and more important to network management that the automatic discovery of the topological structure of the second layer equipment. Now adopting the second layer switch is the main way to build Ethernet. For example in the applications of Loading Balance and Grid Calculation, we must know the situation of the connection between each equipment in the network.This paper proposes a kind of new algorithms on the basis of analyzing and comparing existing topological algorithms, especially the topological discovery algorithms based on the MAC transmit table in switch.Using the algorithm, we can derive out the topological structure by the information in the switch' s MIB, mainly by the information in the MAC transmit table.The network topological discovery tool according to the algorithm has been tested in the real network environment. The experiment proves that this algorithm can find accurately the physical layer equipments in the network, and find out the topological relationship of them correctly.The job mentioned in the paper is a part of the project of security network management technology supported by The Ministry of Information Industry.