Mapping network MAC addresses to physical locations
AssigneeVerizon Media Inc.
InventorsRichard Stephen Allinson, David Alan Glass, Philip Jacob Halley, Matthew Llewellyn Lemare Jones
Life of this patent
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AssigneeVerizon Media Inc.
InventorsRichard Stephen Allinson, David Alan Glass, Philip Jacob Halley, Matthew Llewellyn Lemare Jones
Estimating the term…
Devices in enterprise-scale networks are often tracked by asset catalogs that record the physical locations of respective devices. Such tracking often involves administratively heavy communication of device deployment, and communication or recording errors may lead to missing catalog entries or entries that incorrectly identify the physical locations of the devices. Instead, a MAC address encoding may be established that maps physical locations to particular MAC addresses, such as representing a building, floor, room, row, and rack of a device in the second through sixth MAC address octets. A locator device with a network adapter featuring a selected MAC address that encodes a particular physical address may be inserted into a network device at the physical location. The physical location of the network device may thereafter be queried for the MAC addresses of connected devices, and the selected MAC address may be translated into the physical location of the network device.
A method of specifying a physical location of a network device in a network using a locator device comprising a network adapter, the method comprising:
A locator device that identifies a physical location of a network device, the locator device comprising:
A method of identifying a physical location of a network device in a network, the method comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.