Allied Telesyn International Corporation

Allied Telesyn, Inc.

Tomoyuki Sugihara

The present invention is directed to an apparatus and a method of controlling a stacked switching system. The stacked switching system according to the present invention has a plurality of switches connected to each other through a network backplane. One of the switches in the stacked system is designated as the master unit, whereas the remaining switches are designated as the slave units. The present invention discloses two topology designs for assigning the master duties among the plurality of switches. The first topology design is termed as a fixed topology and the second topology design is termed as a dynamic topology. Both of these two topology designs assign the master control to the switch having the highest priority index. This master duties assignment is performed whenever there is a deletion or addition of switching unit to the system. For the fixed topology design, the master control assignment can only be performed after rebooting the system. On the other hand, for the dynamic topology design, the master control assignment can be performed &ldquo;on-the-fly&rdquo; which means the master control assignment can be performed without the need of rebooting the system.

Intelligent stacked switching system

A novel virtual port method and apparatus for use in the communication between multiple nodes in a network system is disclosed. Particularly, the virtual port concept is implemented in a switching unit having a plurality of physical ports. According to the present invention, at least one virtual port can be defined by the user to represent a corresponding number of group of physical ports. In this case, a single virtual port identification can be used by the network manager to identify all the physical ports belonging to a trunking group. By using one virtual port identification address instead of a group of physical port addresses, a tremendous reduction in processing overhead in the network manager can be achieved.

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Kanagawa-ken, Japan

Tomoyuki Sugihara