Innovium, Inc.

Broadcom Corporation

Meg Pei Lin

Rupa Budhia

Puneet Agarwal

William Brad Matthews

Mani Kumaran

Zheng Qi

Kapil Vishwas Shrikhande

Mark Leonard Buer

Nicholas Ilyadis

Daniel Tai

Liav Leshem

The performance of a switch or other network device is improved by adjusting the number of idle bytes transmitted between data units—that is, the size of the interpacket gap—to increase the bandwidth of a network interface. In some embodiments, the adjustments may be made in a manner designed to compensate for potential mismatches between the clock rate of the network interface and clock rates of interfaces of other network devices when retransmitting data received from those other network devices. In yet other embodiments, the adjustments may be designed to increase available bandwidth for other purposes. In an embodiment, the idle reduction logic is in a Media Access Control ('MAC') layer of a network interface. The idle reduction logic may be enabled or disabled based on user preference, or programmatically based on factors such as a transmission utilization level for the MAC layer, buffer fill level, and so forth.

Handling interface clock rate mismatches between network devices

A switch or other network device may be configured as an ingress edge telemetry node in a telemetry domain. The ingress edge telemetry node may clone certain data units it processes, for example in response to certain telemetry triggers being met. The ingress edge telemetry node may further inject telemetry and/or other data into the cloned data unit. The cloned data unit continues along the same path as the original data unit until it reaches an egress edge telemetry node in the telemetry domain. The second node extracts the telemetry data from the cloned data unit and sends telemetry information based thereon to a telemetry collector, while the original data unit continues to its final destination. Nodes along the path between the first node and the second node may be configured as transit telemetry nodes that insert or otherwise update the telemetry data.

Path telemetry data collection

Prefix entries are efficiently stored at a networking device for performance of a longest prefix match against the stored entries. A prefix entry generally refers to a data entry which maps a particular prefix to one or more actions to be performed by a networking device with respect to network packets or other data structures associated with a network packet that matches the particular prefix. In the context of a router networking device handling a data packet, the one or more actions may include, for example, forwarding a received network packet to a particular 'next hop' networking device in order to progress the network packet towards its final destination, applying firewall rule(s), manipulating the packet, and so forth. To reduce a total amount of space occupied by a prefix tree in storage, each of the nodes of a prefix tree may be configured to store only an incremental portion of a prefix relative to its parent node.

Network device storage of incremental prefix trees

Approaches, techniques, and mechanisms are disclosed for assigning paths to network packets. The path assignment techniques utilize path state information and/or other criteria to determine whether to route a packet along a primary candidate path selected for the packet, or one or more alternative candidate paths selected for the packet. According to an embodiment, network traffic is at least partially balanced by redistributing only a portion of the traffic that would have been assigned to a given primary path. Move-eligibility criteria are applied to traffic to determine whether a given packet is eligible for reassignment from a primary path to an alternative path. The move-eligibility criteria determine which portion of the network traffic to move and which portion to allow to proceed as normal. In an embodiment, the criteria and functions used to determine whether a packet is redistributable are adjusted over time based on path state information.

Load balancing path assignments techniques

The performance of a switch or other network device is improved by adjusting the number of idle bytes transmitted between data units&#x2014;that is, the size of the interpacket gap&#x2014;to increase the bandwidth of a network interface. In some embodiments, the adjustments may be made in a manner designed to compensate for potential mismatches between the clock rate of the network interface and clock rates of interfaces of other network devices when retransmitting data received from those other network devices. In yet other embodiments, the adjustments may be designed to increase available bandwidth for other purposes. In an embodiment, the idle reduction logic is in a Media Access Control ('MAC') layer of a network interface. The idle reduction logic may be enabled or disabled based on user preference, or programmatically based on factors such as a transmission utilization level for the MAC layer, buffer fill level, and so forth.

Redistribution policy engine

This disclosure relates to compressing and/or decompressing a group of similar data units, such as a table or queue of data units processed by a networking device or other computing apparatus. Each data unit in the group may only have values for fields in a master set. The described systems are particularly suited for hardware-level processing of groups of sparsely-populated data units, in which a large number of the data units have values for only a small number of the fields. In an embodiment, non-value carrying fields in a data unit are compressed based on a compression profile selected for the data unit. The compression profile indicates, for each master field, whether the compressed data unit includes a value for that field. Non-value carrying fields are omitted from the compressed data unit. The compression profile also permits compression of value-carrying fields using variable-width field lengths specified in the profile.

Growing community of inventors

Saratoga, CA, United States of America

Meg Pei Lin