Hi,
I have a question about ethernet switches on full duplex "collision- free" LANs.
What if there are multiple nodes sending to the same segment/port, how does the switch handle that? I would think it could only let through one of the frames.
I guess that's not really considered a "collision" since one does get through. Is that right?
How do the other nodes recover from that? In full-duplex mode does Ethernet just not do any resends and let higher layers worry about it?
It seems like the switch could just tell a little fib and say to the nodes that sent the ones that didn't get through that a collision occured, so Ethernet could handle the resend. Maybe that doesn't make sense, but otherwise it just seems like you would have to wait for destination node to tell you that a packet has been lost and that would take more time.
I was just wondering about how this actually works, and I would appreciate it if some one could clear this up, I would appreciate it.
-d