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:
Feb. 19, 2008
Filed:
Apr. 30, 2003
Jin-ru Chen, TaiChung, TW;
Chun-feng Liu, Taipei, TW;
Jin-Ru Chen, TaiChung, TW;
Chun-Feng Liu, Taipei, TW;
Realtek Semiconductor Corp., Hsinchu, TW;
Abstract
The present invention provides a method and apparatus for packet forwarding within a switch controller. In addition to unicast and broadcast forwarding, the method and apparatus can also analyze and forward IP multicast packets without the need of a CPU and a separate multicast address table, thereby enabling IP multicasting for the switch controller. Wherein, specific packet parsing and updating rules are used to analyze IP multicast control packets, and a multicast router or an address table is updated based on the analyzing result. IP multicast packets is then forwarded according to the updated tables. Moreover, with an extra flag bit set in each address table entry, unicast and multicast forwarding can share the same address table.