Cisco Technology, Inc.

Rodney Fong

Ravikanth Samprathi

Suran Saminda De Silva

Anusankar Elangovan

Milton Y Xu

Jaya Sreedharan

Vinayak Kumar

Paolo Zarpellon

Hien Nguyen

Stanley Tang

The present disclosure describes a network appliance and associated access policy protocol (APP) that communicates and obeys access policies within a network. The network appliance (APP node) propagates access policies to other APP nodes that can utilize the policies most effectively. When an access policy reaches the network boundary, intra network bandwidth is optimized. The access policies may be distributed and executed in the cloud&#x2014;e.g. proxy firewall, proxy policy execution.

Method for propagating access policies

A system for providing a substantially balanced distribution of traffic over an aggregation of output lines carrying digital information makes use of m random or pseudo-random bits substantially greater in number than the number of bits (n) used for selection of individual lines. The m bits address a table populated with n-bit entries whose bit combinations correspond with the respective output lines, with the relative numbers of the bit combinations being such as to provide substantially equal loads on the individual lines.

Method and apparatus for efficient load distribution on link aggregations

In one embodiment, a load-balancing algorithm ensures that both network nodes at endpoints of a group of physical links aggregated into a logical channel are using the same load-sharing algorithm and also ensures that the load-sharing algorithm is normalized so that the same flow traverses the same physical link in both directions.

Multinode symmetric load sharing

A method and system has been provided for identifying and processing secure data frames flowing between a source port and a switch port in a network. A data frame from the source port is received at the switch port. The network address of the source port is detected from the data frame. An entry corresponding to the network address of the source port is searched for in a forwarding table. The data frame is identified as a secure or a non-secure data frame on the basis of the entry in the forwarding table. Non-secure data frames are redirected and processed.

Method and system for identifying and processing secure data frames

Potential forwarding loops in bridged networks are detected. A switch monitors the movement of packet addresses in the forwarding table to different ports. If the port associated with an address changes multiple times in a short time duration, then a potential forwarding loop is detected, and a loop corrector is notified to take appropriate action to correct the problem, such as, but not limited to changing the state of a port to a blocking state or disabling an interface, etc. If there are multiple movements outside the short time duration, they may be correct movements adjusting to the actual reconfiguration of a network, and thus, these movements are effectively filtered out of consideration.

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Pleasanton, CA, United States of America

Rodney Fong