Cisco Technology, Inc.

Nitin Garg

Gary S Goldman

Sachin Jain

Raymond Kloth

Deepak Goel

Kent Wayne Wendorf

Man Pak Yip

Sujatha Sundararaman

Pawan Agrawal

Phong Bui

Raymond J Kloth

According to the present invention, methods and apparatus are provided to improve the techniques and mechanisms for forwarding packets at a fiber channel switch. A combined area table/domain table (ATDT) is accessed using destination information associated with a fiber channel packet. Area/port or domain information can be used to address entries in the ATDT. Each entry provides one or more paths to a given destination. Traffic shaping, load balancing, and other policy based forwarding considerations can be applied.

Fibre channel forwarding information base

A method and system for the fair allocation of unused guaranteed bandwidth. Data segments of at least one class of service are received at each of a plurality of ingress line cards. Each class of service has a guaranteed percentage of transmission bandwidth. The system uses a must-serve bit to mark a number of data cells within each class of service. The number of cells marked depends on the guaranteed bandwidth percentage for the particular class of service. The mark is referred to as 'must-serve' since the scheduler must serve the particular class of service to the extent of the marked cells in order to meet the guaranteed bandwidth. The generic switch fabric monitors the cells and the switch CPU reallocates bandwidth so that only the marked cells are provided preferential transmission. Non-marked cells compete equally for excess bandwidth.

In-band must-serve indication from scheduler to switch fabric

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Nitin Garg