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US 6,438,129 B1Granted
Restriction of source address look-ups in network
Assignee3Com Technologies
InventorsKevin Jennings, Edele O'Malley, John Hickey
Life of this patent
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Assignee3Com Technologies
InventorsKevin Jennings, Edele O'Malley, John Hickey
Estimating the term…
A forwarding database in a network switch is established and maintained by performing a look-up for a source address read from an incoming frame to find a match between the source address in the frame and the source address in an entry which includes that source address, a port number and an age field. New entries are made if matches are not found, so that the forwarding database facilitates the dispatch of frames to destination addresses corresponding to source addresses in the table. The performance of a source address look-up is inhibited in the absence of a token, a reservoir of tokens being decremented each time a source address look-up is performed and incremented from time to time, at a selectable rate. The process facilitates the performance of a destination address look-up for every received frame by restricting the bandwidth made available for source address look-ups.
A method of performing source address look-ups in a network switch which receives frames including source addresses and destination addresses and which includes a forwarding database containing entries each comprising a source address read from an incoming packet and a number identifying a port by which that frame has been received, the method comprising:
A method of performing look-ups in a forwarding database of a network switch, wherein the switch has a multiplicity of ports identified by numbers and wherein the switch reads a received frame to extract a source address and a destination address from the frame, performs a destination address look-up in the forwarding database to find a match between said destination address and a source address in the forwarding database, whereby the switch is enabled to dispatch the frame by way of the port associated with the matched source address in the forwarding database;
A method for maintaining a forwarding database in a packet or frame-based switching network switch, said method comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.