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:
Dec. 26, 2006
Filed:
Oct. 21, 2002
Somsubhra Sikdar, San Jose, CA (US);
Somsubhra Sikdar, San Jose, CA (US);
Force10 Networks, Inc., San Jose, CA (US);
Abstract
A high-speed router and method for operation of the core of such a router are disclosed. A switch fabric serves a plurality of ingress and egress ports. Packets are sorted into queues at each ingress port, each queue corresponding to one of the egress ports. Queue status information for each ingress port is communicated to a central scheduler. The scheduler reconfigures the switch fabric to a new port mapping once per epoch, where an epoch is long enough to allow each ingress port to transmit a large plurality of queued packets. The scheduler also sends port mapping information to the ingress ports, so that those ports can match one of their queues with the egress port mapping for each epoch. The switch fabric can achieve extremely high throughput since it doesn't recognize and switch packets per se, but deals with large multi-packet blocks that can be efficiently scheduled by the central scheduler.