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. 24, 1997
Filed:
Dec. 30, 1994
Thomas Jay Cloonan, Downers Grove, IL (US);
Gaylord Warner Richards, Lisle, IL (US);
Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, NJ (US);
Abstract
An out-of-band controller for a large packet switch which is distributed throughout partitions or pipes of the packet switch. Thus, the out-of-band controller is divided into multiple pipe controllers. These pipe controllers are connected and operated in a ring such that each pipe controller is with a respective fraction of the input path requests for packets. The requests are processed concurrently and any request that is not fulfilled in one pipe controller is offered to up to three subsequent pipe controllers to hunt a path for the awaiting packets. The controller, by using up to four levels of parallelism, can hunt paths and set up connections for 256 or more input ATM packet lines, thus providing a throughput of 1 terabit per second or more. By distributing the controller both tremendous aggregate switching speeds may be attained without resort to exotic semiconductor technologies.