Alcatel Lucent

Alcatel

Bryan J Dietz

John W Bailey

Rex Hill

Roberto H Jacob Da Silva

Chiang Yeh

Gregory G Page

Sindhu K Mohandas

Joseph F Olakangil

Armando Montalvo

Yat Sen Lie

John Bailey

Aggregation Switches connected via a virtual fabric link (VFL) are each active and able to communicate via an inter-process communication (IPC) using an IPC Virtual Local Area Network (IPC VLAN). A sub-set of Customer-facing ports (CFPs) of each Aggregation Switch are coupled to the VFL and assigned to the IPC VLAN to enable communication therebetween.

Multi-chassis inter-process communication

An apparatus and method for performing congestion management in a switch or router is disclosed. The apparatus acquires and or generates performance metrics for a plurality of switching module coupled via a switching fabric, generates a performance index based on the attributes from the switching modules, and allocates switching fabric bandwidth based on a weighted combination of the performance metrics. The performance metrics may include past and presents values of some attributes as well as predicted values.

Predictive congestion management in a data communications switch using traffic and system statistics

A high speed switching device including an aggregator, a plurality of intermediate ports, and ingress packet processing resources, is disclosed. The aggregator includes an external switch port operatively coupled to a transport medium, and a demultiplexer that divides an ingress data stream into a plurality of intermediate streams. The plurality of intermediate ports transmit the intermediate streams to ingress packet processing resources. The ingress packet processing resource may include one or more classification devices for parsing, switching or routing, and queueing packets of the ingress stream, prior to transmission to a switching fabric. The switching device optionally includes an egress processor for multiplexing egress data from the switching fabric. Intermediate port traffic may be dynamically modified to minimize load imbalance present in an ingress switching device and or egress switching device. Load balancing may further be achieved by optimization of the physical wiring connections between the aggregator and classification devices.

Enterprise switching device and method

Lookup scheme in which a tuple representing a plurality of flow properties is parsed into multiple subtuples for application in recursive lookups. A first subtuple including a first subset of bits from the tuple is applied to the flow information database and returns a result including a nickname having a smaller bit count than the first subtuple. A second subtuple including a second subset of bits from the tuple and the nickname are combined and applied to the flow information database. The lookups continue until a result indicates that no recursion is required. The final lookup result includes flow information applicable to one or more of modifying, enqueuing or forwarding the packet. A truncated lookup capability enables common processing across a group of distinct flows having common flow properties.

Tuple-based lookup scheme for packet switching node

A method and apparatus for accomplishing source learning in a data switch of the type having a plurality of switching modules where each supports one or more external network devices and a backplane interconnecting the switching modules. Each switching module has logic resident thereon for performing distributed source learning, including configuring unknown source addresses 'seen' in inbound packets and for notifying the other switching modules that such source addresses were 'seen' on a port thereof. Address-port associations are thereby configured on the switch using distributed logic, i.e. without intervention by a centralized management entity. In regard to configuring destination addresses&#x2014;when a destination address is unknown, packets are delivered over a multicast queue until the destination address is found. Once the destination address is found, a method of flow integrity is used to avoid out of order packet delivery when the device transitions from using a multicast flood queue to a unicast queue.

Growing community of inventors

Lake Forest, CA, United States of America

Bryan J Dietz