Trunking

This article is about the networking topic. For the cable enclosure, see Electrical conduit § Trunking. For dangerous transportation, see Trunking (auto).
"Trunk line" redirects here. For the rail line on Norway, see Trunk Line. For other uses, see Trunkline (disambiguation).

In telecommunications, trunking is a technology for providing network access to multiple clients simultaneously by sharing a set of circuits, carriers, channels, or frequencies, instead of providing individual circuits or channels for each client. This is reminiscent to the structure of a tree with one trunk and many branches. Trunking in telecommunication originated in telegraphy, and later in telephone systems where a trunk line is a communications channel between telephone exchanges.

Other applications include the trunked radio systems commonly used by police agencies.[1]

In the form of link aggregation and VLAN tagging, trunking has been applied in computer networking.

  1. ^ Sharp, D.S.; Cackov, N.; Laskovic, N.; Shao, Qing; Trajkovic, L. (2004). "Analysis of public safety traffic on trunked land mobile radio systems". IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. 22 (7): 1197–1205. doi:10.1109/JSAC.2004.829339. S2CID 4912845.