Alcatel Lucent

Alcatel

Worldwide Packets, Inc.

Dennis Lee Weaver

Chiang Yeh

Keith Michael Bly

Kelly Donald Fromm

David Gilson

Andrew Patrick Schultz

Louis Le Gouriellec

Guy Erb

Packet switch operating methods and packet switches receive a plurality of packets using a forwarding plane of the packet switch. Each packet of the plurality conforms to a different one of a plurality of forwarding information formats. The methods and packet switches modify each packet of the plurality to conform to a common forwarding information format instead of a respective one of the plurality of forwarding information formats and forward the modified packets of the plurality to a control plane of the packet switch.

Communicating with a control plane using a forwarding information format and control plane processing of packets devoid of a virtual switch identifier

A data communications switch for dynamically distributing packet processing operations between an ingress and egress processor for load balancing is disclosed. The invention in the preferred embodiment features a switching device including a plurality of switching modules, each of the switching modules including a packet classifier for identifying one or more packet processing operations to be applied to an ingress packet and a controller adapted to allocate each of the identified one or more packet processing operations between a first set of packet processing operations and a second set of packet processing operations, execute the first set of packet processing operations at the ingress processor at which the packet was received, and transmit instructions to the egress processor to execute the second set of packet processing operations. The egress processor then executes the second set of packet processing operations, after which the packet may be transmitted toward its destination node.

Internal load balancing in a data switch using distributed network processing

A method and apparatus for provisioning bandwidth among a plurality of queues in a switching device are disclosed. The bandwidth provisioning employs a QoS label with a timestamp to determine the queue delay associated with the transmission of the packet from an ingress switching device, e.g. ingress blade, to an egress switching device, e.g. egress blade. The QoS label is applied on the ingress blade and removed and read on the egress blade. Using the timestamp, the switch can identify congested priority queues at the ingress blade and selectively enable fragmentation for purposes of preventing particular packets and or particular flows from consuming disproportionately large system resources including bandwidth necessary to communicate packets through the switch fabric. Some QoS labels may further include instruction sets and a fragmentation identifiers used by the egress blade to reassemble the packet fragments. The QoS label, in cooperation with computational and management resources, provide a feedback mechanism to perform real-time bandwidth provisioning within a switch.

Real-time bandwidth provisioning in a switching device

A method and system for providing conditional bandwidth subscriptions to MPLS LSPs. Traffic is policed and/or marked at an ingress node to ensure that traffic that exceeds the LSP's conditional bandwidth is dropped. Traffic above the LSP's committed bandwidth but below the LSP's conditional bandwidth is admitted but marked as suitable for discarding. All traffic below the LSP's committed bandwidth is admitted. A queuing mechanism at each node of the LSP helps ensure that committed bandwidth traffic is protected during periods of congestion. Each node maintains a queue with a first area reserved for periods of congestion and a second area reserved for periods of no congestion. When congestion is encountered, unmarked traffic is stored in the first area and marked traffic is discarded. When no congestion is encountered, both marked and unmarked traffic is stored in the second area.

Growing community of inventors

Spokane, WA, United States of America

Dennis Lee Weaver