Patent ID: 6952396

Claim:
A system for discovering and monitoring an active topology of a dual counter rotating ring (DCRR) at a data link layer in order to enable optimal frame forwarding from a medium to the DCRR and to provide rapid failover in a network component failure event, each access point in the DCRR comprising: a) a topology maintenance protocol (TMP) entity for monitoring individual links of the DCRR, discovering the active topology of the DCRR, communicating topology changes to other access points in the DCRR, and informing frame forwarding and learning processes of the topology to enable failover to a redundant path; b) a frame forwarding process for selecting a shortest path route between a source and destination access point in the DCRR; and c) an address learning process for inspecting a source medium access control (MAC) address in each received frame to learn a shortest path route for each MAC address.