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:
May. 02, 2006
Filed:
Oct. 19, 2001
Stephen M. Alfieri, Scarborough, ME (US);
Chase T. Tingley, Somerville, MA (US);
Stephen M. Alfieri, Scarborough, ME (US);
Chase T. Tingley, Somerville, MA (US);
Marconi Intellectual Property (Ringfence) , Inc., Warrendale, PA (US);
Abstract
A dense virtual router packet switching system includes a memory divided into context areas for a set of virtual private routed networks (VPRNs). Each context area includes a routing table and routing protocol state information for a corresponding VPRN. Each of a set of different routing tasks operates with a separate routing table and separate routing protocol state information to realize a corresponding virtual router. Context selection logic selectively couples the routing tasks to the different context areas of the memory to realize a set of virtual routers for all the VPRNs. The system supports a large number of routes by exploiting the segmentation of the VPRNs. Rather than having a single large routing table and associated routing process, which can load hardware resources in proportion to the square of the number of routes in the routing table, routes are distributed among a number of VPRNs having generally smaller tables and correspondingly less processing demand.