System and method for synchronizing switch fabric backplane link management credit counters
Granted: December 4, 2007
Patent Number:
7304987
A system and method are provided for resynchronizing backplane link management credit counters in a packet communications switch fabric. The method comprises: at an input port card ingress port, accepting information packets including cells and cell headers with destination information; modifying the destination information in the received cell headers; routing information packets between the input port card and output port cards on backplane data links through an intervening crossbar;…
Technique for building a large single-stage cross-connect using multiple devices without interleaving
Granted: December 4, 2007
Patent Number:
7304988
A digital cross-connect switching system that has a single-stage architecture, a scalable bandwidth, and reduced connection memory storage requirements. The scalable bandwidth digital cross-connect switching system includes a plurality of digital cross-connect building blocks. Each digital cross-connect building block includes at least one cross-connect having a plurality of input ports and a plurality of output ports, at least one connection memory communicatively coupled to the…
Protocol-mapping network access device with user-provisionable wide area network flow control
Granted: December 4, 2007
Patent Number:
7304952
In a technique for performing flow control in a wide-area network, a user-specified flow control message such as a Pause message is provisioned at a first node, and a user-specified flow control message filter is provisioned at a second node coupled to the first node. At the first node, the availability of a buffer for data received from the second node is monitored, and in response to a predetermined availability condition, the provisioned flow control message is sent to the second…
System and method for communicating switch fabric control information
Granted: November 20, 2007
Patent Number:
7298739
A system and method are provided for communicating control information in a switch fabric. The method comprises: on a switch card, establishing a plurality of crossbars controlled by an arbiter; initiating a control message; and, distributing the control message on a switch card token bus connecting the crossbars and arbiter elements. Distributing the control message on a switch card token bus connecting the crossbar and arbiter elements includes daisy-chain connecting the elements with…
Configurable switch fabric interface bandwidth system and method
Granted: November 20, 2007
Patent Number:
7298754
A system and method are provided for configuring interface bandwidths in a packet communications switch fabric. The method comprises: interfacing data links with a first plurality of traffic managers (TMs); differentiating port card interface ports into a first plurality of subchannels associated with the first plurality of TMs; and, communicating packets information with the TMs at a first plurality of data rates corresponding to the first plurality of subchannels. More specifically,…
System and method for programming cell packet headers
Granted: November 20, 2007
Patent Number:
7298756
A system and method are provided for controlling packet header information in a packet communications switch fabric. The method comprises: programming the cell header overhead (OH) field definitions; accepting a packet including a plurality of cells and corresponding cell headers, each cell header including a plurality of overhead fields; defining the cell header OH fields; and, transmitting the packet. Defining the cell header OH fields includes defining cell header OH field location,…
System and method for coding a digital wrapper frame
Granted: October 30, 2007
Patent Number:
7289530
A system and method are provided for coding a frame in a packet communications system using a G.709 Digital Wrapper Frame format. The method comprises: accepting digital information; outer encoding the digital information with a Reed Solomon (RS) encoding scheme; interleaving the outer encoded information; inner encoding the interleaved information using a BCH encoding scheme; and, forming a G.709 Digital Wrapper frame including payload and parity bytes. More specifically, a standard DW…
Optical transport network frame structure with in-band data channel and forward error correction
Granted: October 2, 2007
Patent Number:
7278081
An optical transport network data frame structure is configured to provide an in-band data channel. The in-band channel data is contained in the data frame space that would otherwise be allocated to forward error correction (“FEC”) bytes. Consequently, the provision of the in-band data channel does not affect the number of client data bytes contained in the data frame structure. In accordance with a practical embodiment, the data frame structure is compliant with Intra Domain…
Switch fabric backplane flow management using credit-based flow control
Granted: August 28, 2007
Patent Number:
7263066
A credit-based system and method are provided for managing backplane traffic flow in a packet communications switch fabric. The method comprises: accepting information packets including cells and cell headers with destination information; modifying the destination information in the received cell headers; routing information packets between an input port card and output port cards on backplane data links through an intervening crossbar; at the input port card, maintaining a credit…
System and method for tracking multilink packet information
Granted: August 21, 2007
Patent Number:
7260114
A system and method are provided for tracking connections in a network bundle including a plurality of network links. The method comprises: receiving packet fragments in a plurality of sampling rounds; for a current sampling round, recording which links have supplied a packet fragment; and, advancing a record of the received packet fragments in response a packet fragment on each link. Typically, the packet fragments are received with a corresponding first plurality of sequence numbers.…
Method and apparatus for terminating and bridging network protocols
Granted: August 21, 2007
Patent Number:
7260112
Methods and apparatus for bridging network protocols are disclosed. A protocol bridge may be used to function as a target for a network processor while performing a target mode operation, while functioning as an initiator on behalf of the network processor while performing an initiator mode operation. In one embodiment, the protocol bridge determines the mode of operation based on information in a received frame's header. In another embodiment, the protocol bridge couples a Fiber Channel…
Digitally adjusted high speed analog equalizer
Granted: August 7, 2007
Patent Number:
7254173
A high speed CMOS-implemented equalizer architecture as described herein utilizes a digitally controlled analog equalization scheme to equalize intersymbol interference present in an input signal. The equalizer structure includes an inductor high frequency gain boosting stage and a feed forward high frequency equalizer stage connected in series. The equalization performed by each of these gain boosting stages is controlled by one or more digital control signals. The combination of these…
Dynamic allocation of packets to tasks
Granted: July 17, 2007
Patent Number:
7245616
Tasks are dynamically allocated to process packets. In particular, packets of data to be processed are assigned a packet identification. The packet identification includes a lane and a packet sequence number. The term “lane” as used herein refers to a port number and a direction (i.e. ingress or egress), such as Port 3 Egress. A set of resources (e.g., registers and memory buffers) are associated with each lane. The task is allowed to access resources associated with the lane. In…
System and method for initiating multilink fragment reassembly
Granted: July 10, 2007
Patent Number:
7242685
A system and method are provided for initiating the reassembly of received packet fragments in a multilink communication network. The method comprises: receiving packet fragments with corresponding sequence numbers; counting the number of fragments received since the initiation of a pervious packet fragment reassembly; and, initiating packet fragment reassembly in response to the fragment count. Some aspects of the method further comprise: establishing a threshold; and, comparing the…
System and method for communicating TDM traffic through a packet switch fabric
Granted: July 10, 2007
Patent Number:
7242686
A system and method are provided for communicating TDM communications through a packet switch fabric. The method comprises: accepting native TDM frames; converting the native TDM frames to fabric-cellified TDM frames; differentiating the cells of each frame into time slots; interleaving the frame time slots; TDM scheduling the interleaved frame time slots; and, routing the interleaved frame time slots between input port cards and output port cards on backplane data links through an…
Method and apparatus for managing payload buffer segments in a networking device
Granted: July 3, 2007
Patent Number:
7239645
A method and apparatus for bridging network protocols is disclosed. In one embodiment, a data frame is received and stored in a dual-port memory queue by hardware logic. An embedded processor is notified of the data frame once a programmable number of bytes of the data frame have been received and stored. Once notified, the embedded processor may then undertake to read the data frame from the memory queue while the hardware logic is still writing to the memory queue. In one embodiment,…
Minimum latency cut-through switch fabric
Granted: June 12, 2007
Patent Number:
7230947
A system and method are provided for cut-through packet routing in a packet communications switch fabric. The method comprises: accepting information packets addressed to a plurality of output port card egress ports at an input port card ingress port; routing information packets between port cards on backplane data links through an intervening crossbar; maintaining a credit counter for each port card egress destination, at the input port card; decrementing the counter in response to…
Method and apparatus for transferring data across a protocol bridge
Granted: May 29, 2007
Patent Number:
7225274
A method and apparatus for transferring data across a network protocol bridge is disclosed. In one embodiment, a multi-processing engine configuration is used wherein processing engines are tasked with carrying out specific data transfer operations. In another embodiment, this multi-processing engine configuration is implemented in a protocol bridge in which data is being transferred between Fibre Channel and a network bus that is coupled to a host system. In one embodiment, the network…
System and method for tolerating data link faults in communications with a switch fabric
Granted: May 22, 2007
Patent Number:
7221652
A system and method are provided for tolerating data line faults in a packet communications network. The method comprises: serially transmitting information packets from at least one traffic manager (TM); at a switch fabric, accepting information packets at a plurality of ingress ports, the information packets addressing destination port card egress ports; selectively connecting port card ingress ports to port card egress ports; serially supplying information packets from a plurality of…
Pipeline architecture for the design of a single-stage cross-connect system
Granted: May 1, 2007
Patent Number:
7212523
An architecture for a high bandwidth digital cross-connect switching system that is internally non-blocking, has a simpler layout, and employs a reduced number of logic gates. The high bandwidth digital cross-connect switching architecture comprises a Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) cross-connect including M space/time switches. Each space/time switch includes an input bus, an output bus, N×W Flip-Flops (FFs) for storing input data, W N-by-N switches for sorting the data according to…
