International Business Machines Corporation

Alain Pruvost

Olivier Bertin

Jean-Paul Chobert

Olivier Maurel

High speed network nodes can establish new connections by preempting existing ones when insufficient bandwidth is available in the network. Numerous preemption priorities are arranged in a limited number of groups and a median priority level is defined within each group. This median, stored in the topology database of each node of the network, permits better bandwidth utilization per group while consuming very little memory space and generating very low traffic overhead.

Method for preempting connections in high speed packet switching networks

A topology manager within a data communication network including a number of nodes interconnected by bi-directional links, wherein each said node is provided with means for dynamically setting and storing within the node a full topology database including full parent-node-relationship references. The system is is capable of fast path determination and fast spanning tree recovery based on the topology database contents.

Growing community of inventors

Vallauris, France

Alain Pruvost