Apple Inc.

Avaya Inc.

Rockstar Bidco, LP

Huawei Technologies Co., Limited

Hesham Elbakoury

Osama S Aboul-Magd

Sameh Rabie

Keshav G Kamble

Roger Lapuh

Jim Chen

Zenon Kuc

Haixiang Liang

Liming Fang

A VLAN is implemented with a logical hub and spoke topology that obviates local switching. Member devices are connected to a hub device such as a router via intermediate devices such as Layer 2 switches that support individual IP subnets within the VLAN. The Layer 2 switch does not allow bridging, so there is no IP subnet broadcast domain. Further, the Layer 2 switch implements only a single logical broadcast uplink port which is connected to the router. The Layer 2 switch also implements only point-to-point downlink ports, i.e., to individual member devices. Consequently, all traffic is forced to flow through the router, e.g., broadcast traffic, multicast traffic and traffic of unknown destination received by the Layer 2 switch from a member device is only flooded to the router, and the router performs intra-subnet routing in addition to routing between subnets and between VLANs. The router subjects all traffic to security measures and provide services including packet inspection, firewall, policing, metering, accounting, anti-virus, marking, filtering and encryption, and thereby reduce or eliminate the drawbacks associated with local switching.

Secure VLANs

The present invention provides a control function in an access point, switch, or like node on a wireless local area network. The control function operates to ensure frames transmitted by a user terminal are transmitted using an appropriate transmission priority scheme. The control function will assist and provide an appropriate priority level to the user terminal. Frames transmitted from the user terminal are passed through the control function, which will analyze priority level information provided in the frames to determine if the frames were transmitted using the appropriate transmission priority scheme. An enforcement action may be taken in response to identifying frames that were not transmitted using the appropriate transmission priority scheme.

Access category enforcement in wireless local area networks

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Hesham Elbakoury