Greenfield Networks, Inc.

Cisco Technology, Inc.

Harish P Belur

Harish Ramamurthy Devanagondi

Richard John Heaton

Brian Arnold Petersen

Simon Luigi Sabato

You-Wen Yi

Majid Torabi

Nicholas Bambos

Jasper Yeung

The disclosure describes queue management based on queue sets. A queue set comprises a group of packets or packet references that are processed as a single entity or unit. For example, when a queue set reaches the head of a queue in which it is stored, the entire queue set including its packets or packet references is passed for scheduling as a single unit. A queue set provides the benefit of a single operation associated with enqueuing and a single operation associated with dequeuing. Since only one operation on a queue is required for the typical case of several packets in a queue set rather than for every packet, the rate of queue operations may be significantly reduced. A queue set has a target data unit size, for example, a roughly equal number of packet bytes represented by each queue set, regardless of the number of packets referenced by a queue set. This means that a scheduler of a queue manager, which is tasked with metering the number of packet bytes transmitted from each queue per time unit, is provided with a list of packets which represents a predictable quantity of packet bytes, and this predictability streamlines the scheduling task and significantly reduces the number of operations.

System and method for queue management using queue sets

Enhanced switching functionality is achieved by a switching system having of traffic management devices connected with a generic Ethernet switch fabric and an optional flow control device. The traffic management devices use an encapsulated Ethernet frame format to provide an additional of addressing.

Ethernet switch fabric interface

A multi-slice network processor processes a packet in packet slices for transfer over a multi-port network interface such as a switch fabric. The network processor segments a packet into cells having a target size. A group of cells of a common packet form a packet slice which is independently processed by one of a number of parallel processing and storage slices. Load balancing may be used in the selection of processing slices. Furthermore, the network processor may load balance slices across the multi-port network interface to one or more destination slices of another network processor. The multi-slice processor uses post header storage delivery on ingress processing to the multi-port interface thereby reducing temporary storage requirements. The multi-slice network processor may also utilize sequence numbers associated with each packet to ensure that prior to transmission onto a destination network, the packet is in the correct order for a communication flow.

Multi-slice network processor

A parallel packet processing queueing architecture and method are described. A packet is divided up into cells. A first or start processor queue is selected for the first cell. The following cells of the packet are then placed in the queues in a predetermined order. An example of a predetermined order is placing the cells in consecutive processor queues modulo (the number of processor queues) after the start processor. Such a predetermined order is illustrated in the context of a per Cell Contiguous Queueing (CCQ) architecture. The architecture provides benefits of alleviating the pre-processing and post-processing buffering burdens and decreasing the amount of information required for reassembly of the packet.

Queueing architecture and load balancing for parallel packet processing in communication networks

An architecture for a multi-port switching device is described having a very regular structure that lends itself to scaling for performance speed and a high level of integration. The distribution of packet data internal to the chip is described as using a cell-based TDM packet transport configuration such as a ring. Similarly, a method of memory allocation in a transmit buffer of each port allows for reassembly of the cells of a packet for storage in a contiguous manner in a queue. Each port includes multiple queues. The destination queue and port for a packet is identified in a multi-bit destination map that is prepended to the start cell of the packet and used by a port to identify packets destined for it. The architecture is useful for a single-chip multi-port Ethernet switch where each of the ports is capable of 10 Gbps data rates.

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Saratoga, CA, United States of America

Harish P Belur