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. 20, 2004
Filed:
Nov. 26, 1999
Bruce W. Melvin, Roseville, CA (US);
Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P., Houston, TX (US);
Abstract
A method and system for preventing the transmission of stale communications packets by a network multiplexer. Common network hardware and protocol specifications require that communications delayed in transit through a network multiplexer must be discarded after a specified period of time. The method and system employ single bit flags within transmit queue entries to flag queue entries that become stale due to the passage of time while communications packets received by a network multiplexer are stored within the network multiplexer for subsequent transmission. A global clock within the network multiplexer invokes a transmit queue monitoring function at one-second intervals. The transmit queue monitoring function discards queue entries having single bit flag values of “1,” and sets the bit flag values of the remaining queue entries to “1”. In this manner, queue entries are discarded after residing within the queue for between slightly more than one second and slightly less than two seconds. Known queue entries can reside in the queue for two seconds or longer.