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:
Jan. 11, 1994
Filed:
Feb. 19, 1993
Richard D Gitlin, Little Silver, NJ (US);
Zygmunt Haas, Matawan, NJ (US);
AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ (US);
Abstract
Currently, with optical time division multiplexing, a switching node is operated at the peak transmission rate. For example, if the data transmission rate is 10 Gbps, the line cards in the switching circuit are also required to operate at this rate despite the fact that the switching node does not actually need to access the data at this rate. Thus, the electronics, which includes the line cards at the switching node, is expensive and less reliable than a low-speed design. In this invention the requirement of operating the switching node electronics at the high speed link bit rate is eliminated by encoding the packet header field at a lower rate than the information in the data field. As a result, the line cards need only operate at the lower header rate. This is possible because the switching node does not need to process the data portion of the packet, but only the header information. The high-speed data portion of the packet is not optically to electrically converted at the switching node, but it passes almost transparently through the switching node. The invention also discloses overlapping several logical networks on the same physical network.