If you want to send cells to another LANE client, your LANE client would forward cells to the BUS via an existing SVC, and the BUS would forward the cells to the destination LANE client. In this way, LANE enables the connection-oriented ATM network to mimic a connectionless network. Your LANE client sends the cells to the LANE BUS, and the BUS forwards these cells to all of the other LANE clients. As a result, you can have up to 20 LANE and BUS servers. The sending end station must establish a virtual circuit with the router, which establishes a virtual circuit with the destination end station.
Routers can create bottlenecks since routers are slower than switches.
Because LANE is a bridging technology, it also suffers from scalability restraints. LNNI addresses this problem by enabling you to have multiple LANE services. In practice, the more end stations you have, the worse your network will perform. More end stations mean more broadcasts and more virtual circuits, which could be a problem since an ATM network can support only a certain number of virtual circuits at one time. Moreover, LANE is an OSI data-link layer technology and is transparent to the higher layers of the OSI model.