Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Washington University

Marcel Waldvogel

Germano Caronni

George Varghese

Jonathan S Turner

Srinivasan Venkatachary

Hari Adiseshu

Subhash Suri

Fast, scalable methods and devices are provided for layer four switching in a router as might be found in the Internet. In a first method, a grid of tries, which are binary branching trees, is constructed from the set of routing filters. The grid includes a dest-trie and a number of source tries. To avoid memory blowup, each filter is stored in exactly one trie. The tries are traversed to find the lowest cost routing. Switch pointers are used to improve the search cost. In an extension of this method, hash tables may be constructed that point to grid-of-tries structures. The hash tables may be used to handle combinations of port fields and protocol fields. Another method is based on hashing, in which searches for lowest cost matching filters take place in bit length tuple space. Rectangle searching with precomputation and markers are used to eliminate a whole column of tuple space when a match occurs, and to eliminate the rest of a row when no match is found. Various optimizations of these methods are also provided. A router incorporating memory and processors implementing these methods is capable of rapid, selective switching of data packets on various types of networks, and is particularly suited to switching on Internet Protocol networks.

Fast scaleable methods and devices for layer four switching

A system for secure multicast including a plurality of participants that can send and receive multicast messages. A traffic distribution component is coupled to the participating entities, where the traffic distribution component supports multiple receiver communication. A participant key management component operates within each participant entity where the participant key management component uses a first key that is shared with all of the other participants, and a second key that is shared with a subgroup of participants. A group key management component is implemented using a flat data structure having a size that is logarithmically proportional to the number of participants.

Efficient, secure multicasting with minimal knowledge

A system for secure multicast including at least one sending entity operating on a sending computer system, the sending entity with a sending multicast application running on the sending computer system. A number of receiving entities each running on a receiving computer system, the receiving entities having a receiving multicast application running. A traffic distribution component coupled to the sending entity and each of the receiving entities, where the traffic distribution component supports a connectionless datagram protocol. A participant key management component operates within each receiver entity where the participant key management component holds a first key that is shared with the sender and all of the receiving entities, and a second key that is shared with the sender and at least one but less than all of the receiving entities. A group key management component is coupled to the traffic distribution component and includes a data structure for storing all of the participant first and second keys.

Efficient, secure multicasting with global knowledge

A method and apparatus for an exponentially faster technique than is presently utilized in routers for looking-up destination addresses and matching them to a prefix in order to determine an output data link for routing of the data message to a destination. The basic algorithm includes arranging the prefix and corresponding output data link information in sub-databases arranged by prefix length and then using a multi-step prefix length binary search algorithm to sort through the sub-databases to determine a best matching prefix for routing of the data packet. Various refinements of the basic algorithm are disclosed to further enhance the search time including adding markers representative of sub-database entries having a longer prefix length and also various searching methodologies to minimize the number of searching steps including rope searching in various formats. Thus, methodologies are disclosed for building the sub-databases, as appropriate to implement the corresponding novel search routines and perform the novel search routines themselves, and the router which implements all of the foregoing. Many of the inventive features disclosed herein are applicable to other routing DPJ protocols such as OSI Routing, call routing and telephone DPJ networks, and string matching problems.

Growing community of inventors

Winterthur, Switzerland

Marcel Waldvogel