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:
Jul. 08, 1997
Filed:
Aug. 08, 1995
Carl Lindeborg, Shrewsbury, MA (US);
Edward Carroll, Wrentham, MA (US);
James Moran, Methuen, MA (US);
David Bartolini, Charlton, MA (US);
John Griesing, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Liz Lindell, Sutton, MA (US);
Anthony Dean Walker, Rougemont, NC (US);
Bradley S Trubey, Cary, NC (US);
International Business Machines Coporation, Armonk, NY (US);
3Com Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
A token ring network performs address to port mapping by taking advantage of the abilities of the port switched modules and the neighbor notification process, in order to perform address to port mapping on each individual module. Ring monitors are switched from an upstream side of a port to a downstream side of a port when the neighbor notification process enters the port domain. The processor on the module records all the addresses received on the downstream side of the port, when the neighbor notification process is in the domain of that port. If it appears that the neighbor notification process is in the domain of two adjacent ports, the present invention only records addresses from the most downstream of the two adjacent ports, since such a situation is an indication that the upstream ports do not conform to MAC protocol. If a non-protocol station is connected to the last port in a module, the module will collect addresses from that port until the neighbor notification process enters the most upstream port of the module. At that point, addresses are no longer recorded in the most downstream port, and each set of addresses for each port are checked to determine if the last entry in each port has the ARI bits set to one and the source address is similar to the address of the most upstream neighbor of the module. If the addresses are the same, all addresses recorded in that port are ignored, since that port contains a non-protocol station.