Apparatus for and method of flow switching in a data communications network

Abstract

An apparatus and associated method for performing flow switching (tag switching) in a frame switching environment. The flow switching apparatus provides a mechanism whereby flows are identified and tags assigned to them. The identification and assignment of tags to flows is made Independently of other network entities and does not require communications with any other entities within the box itself or other entities in the network. The forwarding decisions are calculated once and stored in a cache or a look up table which can be accessed very quickly. The tag is used as an index into the cache or LUT such that if an entry is found in the cache or LUT for that particular tag, the forwarding decision does not have to be made again. This serves to greatly reduce the time to obtain a forwarding decision which is used by the switching fabric in steering the input frame to the appropriate output port(s). Multiple queues are used along with the cache to facilitate the forwarding of the frames. Frames that generate a cache miss are stored in a slow queue to await software processing. Once a forwarding decision is made, all the frames in the queue are switched at once. Frames that generate a hit are placed on a fast queue for expedited processing.