Frame handler for high-speed fiber optic communication interface
OwnerHanan Potashinventor
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method and system are presented for a frame handler, interfacing a SONET communications network to a computer processor. The highly parallel architecture of the frame handler allows it to operate in non-blocking mode—i.e., it can perform add/drop modifications to an incoming frame and begin re-transmission of the frame before the last incoming byte is received. This reduces latency to much less than that of a conventional frame handler, which must buffer the entire frame before re-transmitting it. Furthermore, the cost of the frame handler is reduced, since there is no requirement for large amounts of high-speed memory in which to store the frame. The frame handler is configurable to handle various STS-n frame sizes, and communication protocols.
Claims29
A communications interface between an optical network and a computer processor or a communication switch, said interface is adapted to synchronously receive and transmit a serial data stream, said communications interface comprising:
- a first queue manager segment adapted to remove a first portion of the data from a frame of the received data stream and transfer the removed data to the computer processor;
- a second queue manager segment adapted to transfer data from the computer processor into a frame of the transmitted data stream;
- a pass-through buffer segment that transfers a second portion of the received frame to the transmitted frame, absent transferring the received frame to the computer processor;
- a first frame index adapted to compute a unique physical address within the received frame of a byte in the received data stream;
- a second frame index adapted to compute a unique physical address within the transmitted frame of a byte in the transmitted data stream;
- first pointer control logic adapted to maintain a pointer to a payload portion of the received frame;
- second pointer control logic adapted to maintain a pointer to a payload portion of the transmitted frame;
- a first index adapted to compute a unique logical address for a byte within the payload portion of the received frame;
- and
- a second index adapted to compute a unique logical address for a byte within the payload portion of the transmitted frame.
A method for interfacing an optical communications network to a computer processor, comprising:
- synchronously receiving a frame of serialized data from the network as an incoming data stream;
- removing at least some of the data from the received frame and transferring the removed data to the computer processor;
- transferring data from the computer processor to a transmitted frame;
- and
- sending the transmitted frame as an outgoing data stream, such that the first byte of the outgoing data stream is adapted to be sent before the last byte of the incoming data stream has been received.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.