Spanning tree and superior BPDUs

SPANNING TREE SIMPLICITY

The bewilderment surrounding the Spanning Tree Protocol and root ports and designated ports (well it bewildered me anyway!) can be immensely simplified by one idea:
It's all about SUPERIOR BPDUs.

Superior BPDUs

So first of all, what is a superior BPDU? It's one that 'wins' i.e. is the LOWEST in the following ranking. If any one is a TIE, then the next lowest down is used to break that tie:

1. Root Bridge ID (RBID)
2. Root Path Cost (RPC)
3. Sending Bridge ID (SBID)
4. Sending Port ID (SPID)
5. Receiving Port ID - only used is very rare cases and is not carried in the BPDU, it is assigned locally.

All the information in 1-4 above is carried (along with the timers) in every BPDU that is sent by every switch running STP.
So how does this help? It explains almost everything about the STP process and convergence, and helps, in my mind, to very succinctly define root port and designated port!

Convergence steps

To recap on the three fundamental steps that need to occur for STP convergence:

1) Elect a root bridge 2) Determine root ports 3) Determine designated ports

Elect a root bridge

Electing a root bridge is determined by the lowest RBID (i.e the superior one) in any BPDU circulating the network. It is determined to be a SUPERIOR BPDU because it has the lowest value in the first superiority criteria. Since the superior RBID is placed into all forwarded BPDUs during the election, thereafter EVERY BDPU WILL HAVE THE SAME RBID. So you can discount it!

Determine root ports

Determining the root port (RP) for any switch is done on the basis of lowest 'resulting' path cost (i.e. RPC in the BPDU + receiving port cost) to the root bridge, which is the SECOND SUPERIORITY CRITERIA. It makes sense that there can only be one lowest cost path to the RB from any other switch, and therefore that there can only be one RP per switch.

Now we already know that RBID is going to be the same in every BPDU, so what's next? Root Path Cost.

And the RP, therefore can be very simply defined as the ONLY port on the switch RECEIVING the SUPERIOR BPDU. There can only one port, because there can only be one superior BPDU. If RPC is a tie, then go to the next criteria, and so on. You also know that BPDUs are not sent out of RPs, because there would be no point. Why? Because you already know that the most superior BPDU on the segment ARRIVED on that port, and yours is sure to be ignored as inferior. Also the BPDU stored on a RP is always the superior one of any sent on the segment.

Determine designated ports

Similarly, the designated port (DP) is the only port on the SEGMENT that is SENDING the SUPERIOR BPDU. RPCs in the sent and received BPDUs are simply compared against each other, without modification. How does it know? Because it doesn't hear any that are superior. If it does, it knows it's not the DP, and stops sending them!  Again, because there can only be one superior BPDU on the segment, only one port can be sending it.

This means that ports that are not disabled and, although not connected to another switch, are participating in STP are also designated ports; hence they do not get put into blocking state.

A port that uses 'portfast' setting is a special case since it does not send BPDUs and therefore cannot really be considered a DP, but it is immediately placed into Forwarding state.