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:
Aug. 08, 2000
Filed:
Dec. 10, 1997
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A protocol adapter for an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) cell switching system has a receive part and a transmit part, the receive part being arranged to convert an incoming ATM cell into a cell structured with a payload and a header including an output index (OI). The transmit part is arranged to convert the structured cell after it is routed through the switching system into an ATM cell, and to output the ATM cell on the ATM communication lines. The transmit part has cell processing logic for adding a bit (mother-bit) in the header of each incoming structured The output index of a mother cell is used to access a location in a look-up table which contains for each output index, a multicast bit for indicating whether the cell is to be multicasted or not, a queue index for indicating a location where to enqueue the cell before it is outputted from the transmit part, a new VP/VC/Li value for constructing a new header, and a next-output index. For the multicast cells, the queue index is replaced by a multicast-queue index in order to store the multicast cells in a dedicated multicast queue. When a multicast mother cell reaches the head of the multicast queue, one or more daughter cells are generated by duplicating the payload of the current mother cell but assigning a different destination address.