Two Company switches are connected via a trunk link. In this network, the original frame is encapsulated and an additional header is added before the frame is carried over a trunk link. At the receiving end, the header is removed and the frame is forwarded to the assigned VLAN. This describes which technology?

A.
DISL

B.
ISL

C.
DTP

D.
IEEE 802.1Q

E.
MPLS

Explanation:

Inter-Switch Link Protocol
The Inter-Switch Link (ISL) protocol is a Cisco proprietary method for preserving the source VLAN identification of frames passing over a trunk link. ISL performs frame identification in Layer 2 by encapsulating each frame between a header and trailer. Any Cisco switch or router device configured for ISL can process and understand the ISL VLAN information. ISL is primarily used for Ethernet media, although Cisco has included provisions to carry Token Ring, FDDI, and ATM frames over Ethernet ISL. (A Frame-Type field in the ISL header indicates the source frame type.) When a frame is destined out a trunk link to another switch or router, ISL adds a 26-byte header and a 4-byte trailer to the frame. The source VLAN is identified with a 10-bit VLAN ID field in the header. The trailer contains a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) value to ensure the data integrity of the new encapsulated frame. Figure 6-3 shows how Ethernet frames are encapsulated and forwarded out a trunk link. Because tagging information is added at the beginning and end of each frame, ISL is sometimes referred to as double tagging.