4.4 VLAN Identification
4.4.5 IEEE 802.10 Protocol

The IEEE 802.10 protocol provides connectivity between VLANs. Originally developed to address the growing need for security within shared LAN/MAN environments, it incorporates authentication and encryption techniques to ensure data confidentiality and integrity throughout the network.

Additionally, by functioning at Layer 2, it is well suited to high-throughput, low-latency switching environments. IEEE 802.10 protocol can run over any LAN or HDLC serial interface.

VLAN Routing implementation treats the ISL and 802.10 protocols as encapsulation types. On a physical router interface that receives and transmits VLAN packets, you can select an arbitrary subinterface and map it to the particular VLAN "color" embedded within the VLAN header. This mapping allows you to selectively control how LAN traffic is routed or switched outside of its own VLAN domain. In the VLAN routing paradigm, a switched VLAN corresponds to a single routed subnet, and the network address is assigned to the subinterface.

To route a received VLAN packet the Cisco IOS software VLAN switching code first extracts the VLAN ID from the packet header (this is a 10-bit field in the case of ISL and a 4-byte entity known as the security association identifier in the case of IEEE 802.10), then demultiplexes the VLAN ID value into a subinterface of the receiving port. If the VLAN color does not resolve to a subinterface, the Cisco IOS software can transparently bridge the foreign packet natively (without modifying the VLAN header) on the condition that the Cisco IOS software is configured to bridge on the subinterface itself. For VLAN packets that bear an ID corresponding to a configured subinterface, received packets are then classified by protocol type before running the appropriate protocol specific fast switching engine. If the subinterface is assigned to a bridge group then non-routed packets are de-encapsulated before they are bridged. This is termed "fall-back bridging" and is most appropriate for nonroutable traffic types.