Alcatel Lucent

Roberto Henrique Jacob Da Silva

Vincent Magret

Ignatius D Santoso

Timothy Hicks

Laurence Rose

A stack switch for performing pass-through forwarding operations, assigning stack switch identifiers to a plurality of stack switches, temporarily disabling supervision messages exchanged by stack switches, and electing a primary master stack switch is disclosed. In the pass-through mode, the stack switch automatically forwards packets between stack ports independent of their destination address to maintain connectivity between adjacent stack switches while conventional bridging and routing operations are disabled. The sequential identifiers are also preferably assigned in accordance with the sequential position of the various stack switches to better reflect the topology of those switches. The switch is also preferably adapted to temporarily disable the transmission of supervision messages between stack switches to prevent re-assignment of network management functions when switch resources are low. The switch may execute a stack switch identifier numbering scheme based on the time the switch became operational.

Stack manager protocol with automatic set up mechanism

In an embodiment, a method is disclosed for operating a network having a group of bridges connected together to form a ring, each bridge having two ports assigned to the ring to form a group of ring ports. The claimed embodiment includes forwarding information through the ring according to one or more spanning tree instances, each instance designating one of the group of ring ports as a respective alternate port that is in a state of discarding. Responsive to learning of a failure by a bridge within the ring, a determination is made, for each spanning tree instance, whether the bridge contains a respective alternate port and if the bridge contains a respective alternate port, changing the state of the respective alternate port to forwarding.

Growing community of inventors

Calabasas, CA, United States of America

Roberto Henrique Jacob Da Silva