Alcatel Lucent

Agere Systems Inc.

Alcatel-Lucent Canada Inc.

Milan Zoranovic

Gerard Damm

Jerome Cornet

David Sonnier

Brian Everett McBride

Peter Mark Rabinovitch

Bashar Said Bou-Diab

Lyle Strub

Christopher W Hamilton

Apparatus for distributing streaming multimedia to at least one end client over a network includes memory and at least one processor operatively connected to the memory. The processor is operative: (i) to receive the streaming multimedia from at least one multimedia source via at least one of a plurality of channels in the network; (ii) when a channel change request generated by the end client for changing a channel and corresponding multimedia content from the multimedia source is not detected, to deliver the at least one multimedia stream to the end client at a first data rate; and (iii) when the channel change request has been detected, to deliver the at least one multimedia stream to the end client at a second rate for a prescribed period of time after receiving the channel change request and, after the prescribed period of time, to deliver the at least one multimedia stream to the end client at the first data rate, wherein the second data rate is greater than the first data rate.

Flexible traffic management and shaping processing for multimedia distribution

The resilient packet ring (RPR for short) is receiving much attention as a telecommunications network architecture. The RPR consists of dual counter-rotating ringlets and implements a ring protection scheme such as ring wrap and source steering. Topology discovery is an important aspect of the network management of the RPR. Herein described is a new topology discovery algorithm which performs in multiple phases. According to one phase of the algorithm, a station on the ring periodically exchange with only its neighboring stations a control messages containing a topology database. The topology database indicates addresses of stations on the ring and their link status. The algorithm should find applications not only in RPR but also other ring architectures.

Topology discovery in a dual ring network

A selective, flow-based datapath architecture is described. A Flow Control Block Manager (FCBM) is located in a flow-based datapath for selectively and intelligently processing packets in the Flow Path. If, according to the FCBM, efficiency gains can be achieved by creating a flow control block and employing flow-based processing on a packet stream, the packets are processed accordingly. If, however, insufficient gains are anticipated the packets are processed in a flow-unaware manner. The FCBM determines the manner in which to process packets based on a set of criteria.

Intelligent selective flow-based datapath architecture

A backpressure mechanism uses a TDM backpressure bus with each port card being assigned time slot. During its time slot, each ingress card/port writes on the bus the number of packets it transmitted to an egress ports during the last data refresh cycle. This information is read by the egress ports and used to compute current depth of the switch fabric output queues. In addition to information received from ingress cards, egress cards keep count of number of packets received from the appropriate switch fabric port and based on it estimate/calculate the current depth of the switch fabric output queue. Congestion states are calculated for all queues by comparing the queue depth with a respective threshold. Each egress card uses these congestion states to generate backpressure signals to ingress cards. Ingress card are using these signals to make decision whether to send or not traffic to destination egress card/port.

Method and apparatus for closed loop, out-of-band backpressure mechanism

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Kanata, Canada

Milan Zoranovic