Juniper Networks, Inc.

Lawrence Hui

Michael Beesley

Dennis C Ferguson

Hsien-Chung Woo

Unmesh Agarwala

Anis Haq

Scott Chew

Anurag P Gupta

Song Zhang

Phil Lacroute

A router includes multiple routing engines. If the active routing engine fails, a backup one of the routing engines detects the failure and assumes the role of active routing engine. A redundancy controller circuit, connected to the multiple routing engines, facilitates the selection and switching of the routing engines. Portions of the packet forwarding engine, in addition to the routing engine, may be redundantly implemented. The active routing engine controls the selection of the redundant portion of the packet forwarding engine.

High capacity router having redundant components

Techniques are described to replicate multicast packets in accordance with a hierarchical data structure. For example, upon receiving a multicast packet, a packet-forwarding engine may communicate the packet to packet-forwarding engines corresponding to starting nodes of the hierarchical data structure. The packet-forwarding engines corresponding to starting nodes of the hierarchical data structure may replicate the multicast packet for local interface cards, and forward the replicated packets to the network. Furthermore, the packet-forwarding engines may replicate the packet for packet-forwarding engines corresponding to downstream nodes. In this manner, the packet replication process is distributed throughout the router decreasing the complexity of necessary replication hardware. Furthermore, the packet replication process is highly scalable resulting in a latency of one fabric hop when the number of packet-forwarding engines doubles. Also, when the hierarchical data structure has more than one starting node, the packet replication process is less susceptible to a single point failure.

Multicast packet replication

A fabric request controller implements flow control for data cells to a network or switch fabric. The fabric request controller issues request messages to the fabric switch and receives back corresponding grant messages. The fabric request controller includes a credit counter for metering the number of allowable outstanding requests. A fake request vector component periodically issues fake requests to compensate for information loss on the switch fabric.

Credit-based flow control over unreliable links

Growing community of inventors

Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Lawrence Hui