Samira Samadi - Yazd University
Ghasem Mirjalily

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is a link management protocol that provides path redundancy while preventing undesirable loops in the Ethernet networks. In fact, STP definesa tree that spans all switches in the network such that the sum of the costs of the chosen links is minimized. Deploying the STP tomanage the topology autonomously is inadequate and do not meet the requirement for Metro Area Networks because STPblocks redundant links leaving traffic on a single path, runningthe risk of congestion, especially close to the root. As a result, STP provides poor support for load balancing. A solution forthis problem is using the multi-criteria Minimum Spanning Tree by considering criterions such as load balancing over links andswitches. In our previous work, we proposed an algorithm named Best Spanning Tree (BST) to find the best spanning treein a Metro Ethernet network. BST is based on the computationof total cost for each possible spanning tree. Therefore, it is very time consuming especially when our network is large. In this paper we propose an algorithm named Load Balanced Spanning Tree (LBST) to find the near-optimal Balanced Spanning Tree to reduce the computational complexity of BST algorithm