CSA Preface Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the SCC Mirror Committee (SMC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T). For brevity, this Standard will be referred to as "CAN/CSA-ISO/IEC/IEEE 8802-1AX" throughout. At the time of publication, ISO/IEC/IEEE 8802-1AX:2016 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA Group will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC. Overview 1.1 Scope Link Aggregation provides protocols, procedures, and managed objects that allow the following: - One or more parallel instances of full-duplex point-to-point links to be aggregated together to form a Link Aggregation Group (LAG), such that a MAC Client can treat the LAG as if it were a single link. - A resilient interconnect using multiple full-duplex point-to-point links among one to three nodes in a network and one to three nodes in another, separately administered, network, along with a means to ensure that frames belonging to any given service will use the same physical path in both directions between the two networks. This standard defines the MAC-independent Link Aggregation capability and general information relevant to specific MAC types that support Link Aggregation. The capabilities defined are compatible with previous versions of this standard. 1.2 Purpose Link Aggregation allows the establishment of full-duplex point-to-point links that have a higher aggregate bandwidth than the individual links that form the aggregation, and the use of multiple systems at each end of the aggregation. This allows improved utilization of available links in bridged local area network (LAN) environments, along with improved resilience in the face of failure of individual links or systems. In applications connecting separately administered networks, the networks are isolated from each others fault recovery events. 1.3 State diagram conventions This document uses the state diagram conventions of IEEE Std 802.1Q-2011, Annex E.1 Should a conflict exist between a state diagram and either the corresponding global transition tables or the textual description associated with the state machine, the state diagram takes precedence.