Distributed router forwarding architecture employing global translation indices
US7292569B1 · kind B1 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Feb 26, 2003 |
| Grant date | Nov 6, 2007 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Nov 16, 2025 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
- CPC primaryH04L49/3009
- WIPO fieldDigital communication
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
An efficient distributed architecture for forwarding packets. The packet to be forwarded arrives in an ingress port, is processed by an ingress forwarding engine, transferred to an egress forwarding engine, and then transmitted via an egress port. An address-based lookup at the ingress forwarding engine identifies the correct egress forwarding engine and also identifies a translation index specifying the forwarding equivalence class (e.g., combination of address prefix and mask) of the packet. The egress forwarding engine then uses the translation index as a memory pointer to recover adjacency information with which to rewrite the packet header. The egress forwarding engine may maintain its adjacency information entirely locally without the need to share the information or propagate updates to ingress forwarding engines. This approach results in a scalable and highly efficient packet forwarding architecture.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.