Cisco Technology, Inc.

David Eric Swanson

James Anthony Aviani, Jr

Frederick Juergens Baker

Kenneth Earl Mueller, Ii

Matthew Richard Gnagy

Mark Rumer

Robert Simon

Robert Arthur Land

The technique of the present invention provides a solution to the problem of routing or redirecting a given client to a replica or proxy server which has a relatively shortest propagation delay to the client. According to the technique of the present invention, a network device referred to as an intercept server sits in front of a host server, and intercepts packets routed to the host server. When desired, packets which are intercepted by the intercept server are replicated, encapsulated and tunneled to selected client servers in the overlay network. The tunneled packets are received and processed by each of the selected client servers, whereupon each of the selected client servers generates a respective spoofed response to the source device identified in the header of the originally intercepted packet. Further, according to the technique of the present invention, each of the selected client servers transmits its respective spoofed response to the identified source device at substantially the same time. The client server associated with the spoofed response which is first received at the identified source device is considered to have the relatively shortest propagation delay to the identified source device, and is identified as the successful client server. Thereafter, the source device will be directed or redirected to communicate directly with the successful client server when subsequently attempting to access information from the host server.

Distributed network traffic load balancing technique implemented without gateway router

A frame relay communications network consists of a number of interconnected nodes. The network nodes include segmentation and reassembly device for fragmenting variable length frames of user data into packets of a predefined length. A preferred embodiment uses ATM AAL5 segmentation and reassembly to construct cells. Header and trailer information is added to each of the cells for transport across the frame relay network.

ATM cells within frame relay technology

Growing community of inventors

Santa Barbara, CA, United States of America

David Eric Swanson