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. 09, 2001
Filed:
Mar. 13, 1997
Shmuel Shaffer, Palo Alto, CA (US);
David Weiss, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Charles Marcus White, San Jose, CA (US);
Siemens Information and Communication Networks, Inc., Boca Raton, FL (US);
Abstract
A network having a number of terminals connected by a hub includes managing data transmission collisions by distinguishing among the terminals following a transmission. In the preferred embodiment, the terminals are arranged in a star configuration and the hub is an Ethernet hub that forwards a data packet from a terminal to all of the remaining terminals. A data packet is stored in memory while it is transmitted to all of the other terminals in the collision domain. If a collision is detected in forwarding the data packet, the transmission is completed to the collision-free terminals, thereby isolating subsequent forwarding of the data packet to the one or more collision-inducing terminals. When a no-carrier condition is sensed, the data packet is retransmitted to the one or more collision-inducing terminals. Preferably, a back-off scheme provides priority to the hub-to-terminal transmissions over the terminal-to-hub transmissions, so that the probability of repeated collisions between the same packets is significantly reduced. After all of the terminals have received the transmission of the data packet, the packet is deleted from memory. A memory threshold may be established in order to prevent the storage of the data packets from reaching a condition in which packets are lost. A pseudo-collision condition may be generated within any incoming data packets when the memory threshold is exceeded or to provide a correction if one of the terminals has “captured” the network.