Multi-link trunking (MLT) is a link aggregation technology developed at Nortel in 1999. It allows grouping several physical Ethernet links into one logical Ethernet link to provide fault-tolerance and high-speed links between routers, switches, and servers. MLT allows the use of several links (from 2 up to 8) and combines them to create a single fault-tolerant link with increased bandwidth. This produces server-to-switch or switch-to-switch connections that are up to 8 times faster. Prior to MLT and other aggregation techniques, parallel links were underutilized due to Spanning Tree Protocol’s loop protection. Fault-tolerant design is an important aspect of Multi-Link Trunking technology. Should any one or more than one link fail, the MLT technology will automatically redistribute traffic across the remaining links. This automatic redistribution is accomplished in less than half a second (typically less than 100 millisecond) so no outage is noticed by end users. This high speed recovery is required by many critical networks where outages can cause loss of life or very large monetary losses in critical networks. Combining MLT technology with Distributed Split Multi-Link Trunking (DSMLT), Split multi-link trunking (SMLT), and R-SMLT technologies create networks that support the most critical applications. A general limitation of standard MLT is that all the physical ports in the link aggregation group must reside on the same switch. SMLT, DSMLT and R-SMLT technologies removes this limitation by allowing the physical ports to be split between two switches. Split multi-link trunking Split multi-link trunking (SMLT) is a Layer-2 link aggregation technology in computer networking originally developed by Nortel as an enhancement to standard multi-link trunking (MLT) as defined in IEEE 802.3ad. Link aggregation or MLT allows multiple physical network links between two network switches and another device (which could be another switch or a network device such as a server) to be treated as a single logical link and load balance the traffic across all available links. For each packet that needs to be transmitted, one of the physical links is selected based on a load-balancing algorithm (usually involving a hash function operating on the source and destination Media Access Control (MAC) address information). For real-world network traffic this generally results in an effective bandwidth for the logical link equal to the sum of the bandwidth of the individual physical links. Redundant links that were once unused due to Spanning Tree’s loop protection can now be used to their full potential. A