Cisco Technology, Inc.

Karthikeyan Gurusamy

Michael R Smith

Mouli Vytla

Chandramouli Radhakrishnan

Giovanni Meo

Chickayya Naik

Faisal Mushtaq

Shreeram Bhide

Gyaneshwar S Saharia

Gaetano Borgione

Senthilkumar Krishnamurthy

Hemant K Hebbar

Nelson B D'Souza

Efficient multicasting within a layer 2 network is provided. Participation by a layer 3 router is not required. The spanning tree created by common layer 2 networking protocols is exploited for multicast signaling and traffic handling.

Efficient multicast packet handling in a layer 2 network

A mechanism for a network device to constrain multicast flooding of out-of-profile multicast frames is provided by defining a multicast flood domain that includes a subset of ports that are members of the broadcast domain. Such a multicast flood domain can be user configured or dynamically configured to include device ports that are coupled to network elements that should receive such out-of-profile multicast transmissions and exclude network elements that should not receive such multicast transmissions. In one embodiment of the present invention, such capability is provided by incorporating into a network device a mechanism for performing a multicast flood domain lookup of an address table in the event that an out-of-profile multicast frame is received.

Constraining flooding of multicast traffic in Layer2 networks

An efficient distributed architecture for forwarding packets. The packet to be forwarded arrives in an ingress port, is processed by an ingress forwarding engine, transferred to an egress forwarding engine, and then transmitted via an egress port. An address-based lookup at the ingress forwarding engine identifies the correct egress forwarding engine and also identifies a translation index specifying the forwarding equivalence class (e.g., combination of address prefix and mask) of the packet. The egress forwarding engine then uses the translation index as a memory pointer to recover adjacency information with which to rewrite the packet header. The egress forwarding engine may maintain its adjacency information entirely locally without the need to share the information or propagate updates to ingress forwarding engines. This approach results in a scalable and highly efficient packet forwarding architecture.

Distributed router forwarding architecture employing global translation indices

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Karthikeyan Gurusamy