L2F, or Layer 2 Forwarding, is a protocol developed by Cisco to establish Virtual Private Network connections over the Internet.
Virtual dial-up allows many separate and autonomous protocol domains to share common access infrastructure including modems, Access Servers, and ISDN routers. RFCs prior to 2341 have specified protocols for supporting IP dial-up via SLIP and multiprotocol dial-up via PPP.
The Layer Two Forwarding protocol (L2F) permits the tunneling of the link layer (i.e., HDLC, async HDLC, or SLIP frames) of higher level protocols. Using such tunnels, it is possible to divorce the location of the initial dial-up server from the location at which the dial-up protocol connection is terminated and access to the network provided.
