Patent ID: 6894970
Filing Date: 2005-05-17
Classification: H04J,H04L,H04Q

Abstract:
1. A method of switch fabric protection comprising: simultaneously launching parallel duplicate data streams through two duplicated substantially identical switch fabrics, including launching a first data stream through a first switch fabric comprising a first N×M crossbar switch, and launching a substantially identical second data stream through a second switch fabric comprising a substantially identical second N×M crossbar switch, wherein N is the number of ingress ports and M is the number of egress ports of each respective N×M crossbar switch; receiving said parallel duplicate data streams after passing simultaneously through said first and said second switch fabric; examining said received duplicate data streams in accordance with predetermined selection criteria; if either of said duplicate data streams satisfies said criteria and the other said duplicate data stream does not satisfy said criteria, then selecting said duplicate data stream that satisfies said criteria and discarding said duplicate data stream that does not satisfy said criteria; and if both of said duplicate data streams satisfy said criteria, then arbitrarily selecting one of said duplicate data streams and arbitrarily discarding the non-selected duplicate data stream; wherein said switch fabrics transmit said data streams encapsulated in fixed sized chunk payloads, wherein said duplicate data streams comprise duplicate sequences of data structures, wherein said data structures are said fixed sized chunk payloads, wherein said data structures are encapsulated before said launching with a code selected from the group consisting of forward error correction code and cyclic redundancy code, and wherein said selecting of said data stream is performed on a structure-by-structure basis in accordance with said code encapsulated with said data structure.