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. 10, 2015
Filed:
Mar. 14, 2012
Claude Basso, Nice, FR;
Todd A. Greenfield, Rochester, MN (US);
Bruce M. Walk, Rochester, MN (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A distributed switch may include a hierarchy with one or more levels of surrogate sub-switches (and surrogate bridge elements) that enable the distributed switch to scale bandwidth based on the size of the membership of a multicast group. Moreover, each surrogate may optimize the hierarchy according to one or more optimization criteria. For example, each surrogate in the hierarchy may have the necessary information to ensure that if the next surrogate in the hierarchy is unavailable, the data may be routed to a backup surrogate. The selected hierarchy may be further optimized by skipping surrogates (or a surrogate level) such that the data intended for a skipped surrogate is sent to a surrogate in a lower-level of the hierarchy. This may better utilize the connection interfaces in the transmitting sub-switches and eliminate any unnecessary surrogate-to-surrogate transfers.