Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Murat Yuksel

Miriam C Kadansky

Dah Ming Chiu

Radia Joy Perlman

Guy Lewis Steele, Jr

John Reynders

A system for selecting routing information from a routing table describing alternative routes between end nodes. The routing table represents a set of minimum cost, deadlock-free routes between end nodes. The selected routing information is included in forwarding tables, and sent to networking devices in the network. The selected routing information is optimized for at least one network performance metric, such as overall network capacity or fault tolerance. Capacity optimization is obtained by selecting from alternative routes stored within the routing table such that the standard deviation of the number of routes flowing over each link in the network is minimized. Fault tolerance optimization is achieved by selecting from the alternative routes stored in the routing table such that the selected route for a given end node pair has a 'failover' route with a maximum number of dissimilar links from the selected route.

Method of optimizing network capacity and fault tolerance in deadlock-free routing

A system and method for adding routing information for a node to a routing table, which efficiently makes necessary changes to the routing table to support routing to and from the node, while maintaining the deadlock-free quality of the paths described by the routing table. The routing table is generated by storing routing information in the routing table that reflects and describes a deadlock-free set of paths through a network of nodes. A row of entries is added to the routing table describing how to forward data units from the node. A column of entries is added to the routing table describing how to forward data units addressed to the node. The forwarding information within each entry added to the routing table maintains the deadlock-free quality of the set of paths represented by the forwarding table.

Efficient system and method of node and link insertion for deadlock-free routing on arbitrary topologies

A distributed system and method generate 'layered routes' that reflect a layered representation of a network, which representation provides deadlock-free routes. The layered representation consists of an ordered set of layers, where each layer is a deadlock-free sub-topology of the network. In determining routes, the links used in each route are constrained to be taken from layers of non-decreasing order as the route extends from source to destination. A device that determines a better or equal cost path to a destination node with respect to its current path to that node sends a route information message to its neighbor devices. The receiver of a route information message may then accept the message and begin using the new path described by the message, or reject the message without using the new path.

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Troy, NY, United States of America

Murat Yuksel