TABLE MANAGING METHOD FOR MAC BRIDGE

PURPOSE:To perform simple and efficient table management to reduce performance lowering caused by access to a bus, memory competition and information exchange between CPUs in the case of table reference at a MAC bridge composed of plural network interfaces. CONSTITUTION:Concerning a MAC bridge 101 composed of over one network interfaces 103 provided with one CPU 102 for management and over one ports 104, each network interface individually manages local MAC address tables 106 and 107, and each of learning information is transmitted to a master mAC address table 105 provided at the CPU for management. Thus, the MAC address table information of the entire bridge can be unified, and each network interface registers the transmitting source MAC address of a received frame on the local MAC address table and registers the transmitting source MAC address of a frame transmitted from the other network interface as well.