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. 04, 2001
Filed:
Dec. 04, 1998
Kenneth Moberg, Boulder Creek, CA (US);
Cisco Technology, Inc., San Jose, CA (US);
Abstract
According to an embodiment of the present invention, two routers coupled through a network, such as a local access network (LAN), may be used to serve the function of redundancy to avoid the failure of a connection. The LAN may be used as a backplane to substitute for a bus between two processors. According to an embodiment of the present invention, the two routers may send their medium access control (MAC) addresses to each other and compare these MAC addresses. The router associated with the MAC address that meets a predetermined criteria may be deemed as a primary router and the other router can be deemed as a secondary router. An example of meeting the predetermined criteria is the router associated with the lower MAC address. Once processor states, such as stand alone, primary, and secondary, are established for the two routers, the primary router may serve the function of a standard router, while the secondary router monitors the health of the primary router and becomes a primary router should the original primary router have a failure.