Marvell Asia Pte., Ltd.

Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Cavium, Inc.

Leonid Livak

Ravindran Suresh

Zubin Shah

Shih-Jeff Chen

Colin John Whittaker

Ke Zhang

Tahsin Erdogan

James Paul Rivers

Mark Kamichoff

Yuan Yuan

Sunita Bhaskaran

Ashwini Reddy

Shrawan Chittoor Surender

Shriram Srinivasan

Abhishek Vinayak Naik

Chinchu Merine Joseph

A host-to-ToR switch advertisement protocol can be used at a data center network edge to receive IP advertisements from hosts and convey ToR switch availability status (e.g., in service, intentionally out of service, or unintentionally out of service) back to hosts and vice versa. The host server computers can have the ability to advertise an arbitrary number of IPv4 or IPv6 prefixes to the network through the ToR switches. A single host server computer can leverage multiple instances across multiple ports to the same switch or different switches to implement load balancing (e.g., equal cost multipath (ECMP)) and fault tolerance. The host server computers benefit from an increased availability by receiving network traffic via multiple ToR switches, a single ToR switch with multiple links, or a combination of both.

Network rack of host server computers with increased network availability

Systems and methods of network packet switching use a table representation of a trie data structure to identify a timestamp (TS) range (or time range) for a received packet based on the packet timestamp (TS). The trie data structure is programmed with a plurality of predetermined time ranges. Each node in the trie data structure corresponds to a TS prefix and is associated with a corresponding predetermined time range. A search engine in the network switch can use the packet TS as a key to traverse the trie data structure and thereby matching the packet TS to a predetermined time range according to a Longest Prefix Match (LPM) process. Provided with the TS ranges of the incoming packets, various applications and logic engines in the network switch can accordingly process the packets, such as determining a new destination IP address and performing channel switch accordingly.

Timestamp-based packet switching using a trie data structure

System and method of network packet switching using a table representation of a trie data structure to identify a timestamp (TS) range (or time range) for a received packet based on the packet timestamp (TS). The trie data structure is programmed with a plurality of predetermined time ranges. Each node in the trie data structure corresponds to a TS prefix and is associated with a corresponding predetermined time range. A search engine in the network switch can use the packet TS as a key to traverse the trie data structure and thereby matching the packet TS to a predetermined time range according to a Longest Prefix Match (LPM) process. Provided with the TS ranges of the incoming packets, various applications and logic engines in the network switch can accordingly process the packets, such as determining a new destination IP address and performing channel switch accordingly.

A network switch to support flexible lookup key generation comprises a control CPU configured to run a network switch control stack. The network switch control stacks is configured to manage and control operations of a switching logic circuitry, provide a flexible key having a plurality of possible fields that constitute part of a lookup key to a table, and enable a user to dynamically select at deployment or runtime a subset of the fields in the flexible key to form the lookup key and thus define a lookup key format for the table. The switching logic circuitry provisioned and controlled by the network switch control stack is configured to maintain said table to be searched via the lookup key in a memory cluster and process a received data packet based on search result of the table using the lookup key generated from the dynamically selected fields in the flexible key.

Apparatus and method for enabling flexible key in a network switch

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Leonid Livak