The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jun. 25, 2019
Filed:
Dec. 18, 2017
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Robert K. Floyd, III, Clermont, FL (US);
James W. Ling, McKinney, TX (US);
Roger Hoffmann, Munich, DE;
Catalin Dumitru Marica, Bucharest, RO;
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
An approach is provided for protecting a network from a unicast flood. If the destination MAC address of a frame is not included in a table of unknown MAC addresses, the MAC address is added to the table and the frame is forwarded to non-blocked spanning tree links to find the MAC address in the network. If the MAC address is included in the table, and if a timer for suppressing forwarding of frames is active, the frame is discarded, or if the timer is inactive, a counter for counting received frames is incremented and compared to a threshold value. If the counter is greater than the threshold value, the timer is activated and the frame is discarded. If the counter is not greater than the threshold value, the frame is forwarded to the non-blocked spanning tree links to find the MAC address in the network.