What Does Transparent Bridge Mean?
A transparent bridge is a common type of bridge that observes incoming network traffic to identify media access control (MAC) addresses. These bridges operate in a way that is transparent to all the network’s connected hosts.A transparent bridge records MAC addresses in a table that is much like a routing table and evaluates that information whenever a packet is routed toward its location. A transparent bridge may also combine several different bridges to better inspect incoming traffic. Transparent bridges are implemented primarily in Ethernet networks.
Techopedia Explains Transparent Bridge
Transparent bridges maintain a list of MAC addresses, as do routers, based on all the received frames’ source data-link MAC addresses. These tables are used for address look-up while forwarding a frame. Transparent bridges save and maintain the source-route addresses of incoming frames by listening to all the connected bridges and hosts. They use a transparent bridging algorithm to a accomplish this. The algorithm has five parts:
