Cisco Discovery Protocol overview

Using multicast announcements to share information about Cisco devices, Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is a proprietary Layer 2 protocol that is equivalent to the RUCKUS protocol Foundry Discovery Protocol (FDP).

Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) packets are used by Cisco devices to advertise themselves to other Cisco devices. By default, RUCKUS devices forward these packets without examining their contents. You can configure a RUCKUS device to intercept and display the contents of CDP packets. This feature is useful for learning device and interface information for Cisco devices in the network.

RUCKUS devices support intercepting and interpreting CDP version 1 and CDP version 2 packets.

Note: The RUCKUS device can interpret only the information fields that are common to both CDP version 1 and CDP version 2.
Note: When you enable interception of CDP packets, the RUCKUS device drops the packets. As a result, Cisco devices will no longer receive the packets.

CDP support was replaced with the IEEE 802.1AB standard Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) that is implemented by multiple vendors and is functionally similar to CDP. It is used to share information about other directly connected Cisco equipment, such as the operating system version and IP address. CDP can also be used for On-Demand Routing, which is a method of including routing information in CDP announcements so that dynamic routing protocols do not need to be used in simple networks.

Parent topic: Cisco Discovery Protocol