IEEE 802.1ad Tagging

IEEE 802.1ad tagging provides finer granularity for configuring IEEE 802.1Q tagging, enabling you to configure the IEEE 802.1Q tag profile for a single port, or to direct a group of ports to a globally-configured tag profile. This feature allows you to create two identical IEEE 802.1Q tags (IEEE 802.1ad tagging) on a single device. This enhancement improves Super Aggregated VLAN (SAV) interoperability between RUCKUS ICX devices and other vendors’ devices that support the IEEE 802.1Q tag-profiles, but are not very flexible with the tag-profiles they accept.

Note: RUCKUS ICX devices treat a double-tagged Ethernet frame as a Layer 2 only frame. The packets are not inspected for Layer 3 and Layer 4 information, and operations are not performed on the packet utilizing Layer 3 or Layer 4 information.

The following figure shows an example application with IEEE 802.1ad tagging.

IEEE 802.1ad Configuration Example

In this example, the untagged ports (to customer network) accept frames that have any IEEE 802.1Q tag other than the configured tag-profile 9100. These packets are considered untagged on this incoming port and are re-tagged when they are sent out of the uplink towards the provider. The IEEE 802.1Q tag-profile on the uplink port is 8100, so the RUCKUS ICX device will switch the frames to the uplink device with an additional 8100 tag.

In this section:

  1. Tag Profile Configuration Rules
  2. Configuring Tag Profile
  3. Selective Q-in-Q
    Q-in-Q is supported using tag-profile, where all the traffic on a tag-profile enabled port is tunneled using one service VLAN (SVLAN).
Parent topic: Aggregated VLANs (Tag Profiles)