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. 23, 2003
Filed:
Nov. 30, 1998
Bharat K. Singh, Roseville, CA (US);
Bruce W. Melvin, Roseville, CA (US);
Patricia A. Thaler, Carmichael, CA (US);
Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P., Houston, TX (US);
Abstract
The present invention provides an improved shared memory switching method in which a guaranteed minimum number of buffers per output port is reserved for each input port. The shared memory may also be optionally divided into reserved and unreserved buffers, with the guaranteed minimum number of buffers being provided from the reserved buffers. The unreserved buffers are available to any port and will handle burst communications and other events that cause a given input port's allocation of reserved buffers to be exhausted. So that bursts are also handled fairly among input ports, additional optional features of the present invention include limiting the number of unreserved buffers that may be consumed by a single input port. For fairness among output ports, method also preferably fairly allocates unreserved buffers among the output ports.