3com Corporation

Michael Gorokhovsky

Haim Rochberger

Sarit Shani Natanson

Alexander Or

An apparatus for and a method of establishing a connection between a source and destination node using multiple parallel paths. To establish a connection, bandwidth capacity on one or more parallel paths are aggregated and combined to form a route having a bandwidth larger than any single path. A technique similar to inverse multiplexing is used at the source end to split the cell stream into multiple parallel paths. At the destination end, the parallel multiple cell streams are inverse demultiplexed and the multiple cell streams combined into a single cell stream. The parallel routes are established by building parallel VCCs for the same call via the network. The ATM signaling process at the source and destination nodes is modified to accommodate multiple VCCs. In addition, the hardware at each source and destination node is configured to perform the inverse and inverse demultiplexing. Further, the control software at the source and destination nodes is modified to implement the call handling required of such a multiple VCC call, including setup, tear down, error handling, etc.

Apparatus for and method of establishing a route utilizing multiple parallel segments in an asynchronous transfer mode network

A method of permitting older networks based on E-IISP routing to operate in newer PNNI based networks. The invention combines the PNNI and E-IISP routing schemes and permits their simultaneous execution in the same ATM network. The E-IISP routing scheme is modified so as to operate in unison with the minimal PNNI implementation configured on each node. The Hello protocol and associated Finite State Machine (FSM) are utilized to determine whether a remote node is in the same peer group. If it is determined that both nodes are in the same peer group, the ports on either side of the link are configured as standard PNNI type ports. If it is determined that the two nodes are from different peer groups, the ports on either of the link are configured as E-IISP type ports. Foreign address information is then exchanged between the two nodes thus permitting border nodes to learn about other peer groups from their respective remote nodes. Relatively large networks can be constructed that do not have any hierarchy as in networks running the full PNNI standard. Via the Hello protocol, changes made to links between nodes will be detected immediately and the port configuration modified appropriately.

Growing community of inventors

Bat Hefer, Israel

Michael Gorokhovsky