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. 02, 2010
Filed:
Mar. 02, 2007
Hong Zhang, Kanata, CA;
Guoli Yin, Nepean, CA;
Peter Ashwood Smith, Hull, CA;
Nortel Networks Limited, St. Laurent, Quebec, CA;
Abstract
Alternate multicast/broadcast paths may be calculated in a routed network to enable broadcast/multicast traffic to be transmitted around a local failure in the routed network until the routing system reconverges on a new network topography. According to an embodiment of the invention, the nodes on a multicast tree or a broadcast tree may compute alternate paths for each of the downstream nodes in the multicast/broadcast tree or for select nodes in the multicast/broadcast tree. The select nodes may be those nodes that have advertised membership in the multicast or a set number of hops downstream on the branch affected by the failure. The alternate paths may be unicast paths from the node to the other nodes on the multicast/broadcast tree. U-turn nodes may be used where there is no regular loop-free alternate network path to a node on the downstream multicast/broadcast tree.