Alcatel Lucent

Alcatel Canada Inc.

Newbridge Networks Corporation

William Ross McEachern

Toby James Koktan

Steven William Buchko

Aaron Matthew Willis Brumpton

Troy W Manary

Stephen J Williams

Embodiments of the invention are directed to monitoring resources of a network processor to detect a condition of exhaustion in one or more of the resources over a predetermined time interval and to provide an indication of the condition. Some embodiments periodically sample various resources of a network processor and from the samples calculate utilization of the network processor's memory bus and core processor, and determine if an interworking FIFO packet queue error has occurred. Such information may help network operators and/or support engineers to quickly zero in on the root cause and take corrective actions for network failures which previously could have been attributed to many different causes and that would have required significant time and effort to troubleshoot.

Monitoring resource congestion in a network processor

A router is disclosed for use in a network to carry data packets therein. Each router provides a hop along a path through the network extending from a source network address node to a destination network address node. Each route for routing data packets contains a destination network address to a next successive hop along a path between the source network address and the destination network address. Each router has a central routing processor in communication with its forwarders over a control medium to provide routing tables to each forwarder defining the next hop for forwarding received data packets for each destination address. Routing table updates of the forwarders by the central routing processor are sequentially downloaded to all forwarders simultaneously from the central routing processor, using a negative acknowledgement protocol. The central routing processor selectively responds to a negative acknowledgement message from a forwarder to re-transmit routing table updates.

System and method of downloading configuration data from a central location to components for a communication switch

There is provided a method and apparatus for the prioritization, multiple queuing and selective processing of PVC management frames by a Frame Relay message processing device. The device had an input port for receiving the messages. It also provides a number of message queues for storing and retrieving the received messages, each of the queues respectively corresponding to one of a number of response priority levels which vary from highest priority to lowest priority. Each of the response priority levels is assigned to a number of message classes associated with predetermined link management processes for communicating the status of message relay links among networking devices. The message processing device has a first processor for determining the message class associated with each of the received messages and for allocating each of the messages to a corresponding one of the queues based upon the response priority level assigned to the determined message class. A second processor is provided for retrieving each of the messages from the queues, and an output port is provided for dispatching the retrieved messages.

Prioritized PVC management queues for improved frame processing

Growing community of inventors

Kanata, Canada

William Ross McEachern