Alcatel Lucent

Timothy Hicks

Vincent Magret

Ignatius D Santoso

Roberto Henrique Jacob Da Silva

Jagjeet Bhatia

Phil S Ghang

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

The present invention features embodiments of automatically re-enabling a disabled port or physical media interface by monitoring the link status of the physical layer interface. Any change in the link status automatically re-enables a previously disabled port, thereby permitting data coming in through the previously disabled port to be admitted into the switch and automatically forwarded or routed/switched, without the network administrator manually issuing any commands to manually re-enable the port.

Growing community of inventors

Newbury Park, CA, United States of America

Timothy Hicks