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:
Apr. 17, 2001
Filed:
Nov. 24, 1997
Flavio Giovanni Bonomi, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Kannan Devarajan, Cupertino, CA (US);
Cabletron Systems, Inc., Rochester, NH (US);
Abstract
An ATM switch supporting multicast transmissions and efficient transmission of frames. A cell is received on a multicast connection and transmitted on several branches/ports. Instead of copying a multicast cell several times for each output branch, only one copy of each multicast cell is maintained. The cell order and the stored cell data form a physical queue. Several logical queues are maintained, one for each output branch. In one embodiment, linked lists are used to maintain the queues. A cell in the physical queue is deleted after all logical queues traverse that cell. A shared tail pointer is used for all the logical queues to minimize additional processing and memory requirements due to the usage of logical queues. The queues enable cells forming a frame to be buffered until the end of frame cell is received, which provides for efficient handling of frames.