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:
Sep. 01, 1998
Filed:
Mar. 14, 1996
Bruce L Lieberman, Los Altos, CA (US);
Starlight Networks, Inc., Mountain View, CA (US);
Abstract
The present invention provides a method for achieving alignment of the header fields of a specific layer, such as the transport layer header fields, at a receiving host. The receiving host determines a number of padding bytes that need to be added to the transport layer header for the fields to be properly aligned in the memory of the receiving host. This number is determined dynamically for each connection because different connections require different numbers of padding bytes. The number of padding bytes for a connection is determined by the receiving host from the first packet received for a particular connection. Specifically, the receiving host examines this first packet and determines the position of the first byte of the transport layer protocol header, and therefore, the number of padding bytes required to achieve 32-bit (or 64 bit) alignment. The receiving host communicates the number of padding bytes to the transmitting host. The transmitting host then adds the specified number of padding bytes to the beginning of the transport layer header for the subsequently transmitted packets for this connection. The format of the padding bytes is such that when the receiving host reads a packet it can determine from the first padding byte how many padding bytes are in the packet, and therefore, how many bytes to skip over.