Packet transfer method and apparatus
AssigneeNEC Corporation
InventorHiroshi Ueno
Life of this patent
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Abstract
To provide a communication apparatus that can relieve the processing load when packet transfer is made with hardware. A packet transfer apparatus includes an input buffer for storing temporarily an input packet, an address acquiring section for acquiring the information needed for the transfer, a retrieval circuit for retrieving the information regarding the output with the acquired destination address as a key, a label insertion circuit for encapsulating a packet with the labels in the maximum number of stack layers M designated for a packet group having a unit of destination address, and a switch section for switching the encapsulated packet to a desired output destination port.
Claims11
A packet transfer method comprising setting the number of layers in a label stack entry to be appended for each unit of packet destination, and appending label stack entries of said number of label layers at an entrance edge node into a packet transfer network.
A packet transfer apparatus, wherein for a packet having appended the label stack entries in the number of label layers determined for each unit of destination an initial label position of said label stack entries is recognized employing a changeable pointer bit.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.