Patent ID: 7636299

Claim:
A repeater having a plurality of ports for transmitting and receiving packets in order to form a ring type network for transmitting the received packets on the basis of an address included in a received packet and a transmitting port database indicating correspondence to an identifier of a port to transmit the packet having the address as the destination, comprising a control packet processing block operable to detect reception of a fault notifying packet transmitted from a repeater having detected a fault; and a control block operable to update, upon reception of the fault notifying packet from an immediately adjacent repeater, a port identifier of the transmitting port database having a port identifier of the port having received said fault notifying packet into a port identifier of a port connected to another immediately adjacent repeater, wherein the transmitting port database is further operable to indicate correspondence to a number of hops indicating a number of repeaters used to transfer the packet having the address as the destination up to a outside of the ring type network, the control packet processing block is further operable to extract, upon reception of said fault notifying packet, the number of hops in the fault section indicating the number of repeaters used to transfer the packet up to its own repeater from the fault section included in the fault notifying packet and to notify the number of hops to the control block, and the control block is further operable to update, upon reception of the fault notifying packet from an immediately adjacent repeater, the port identifier of the transmitting port database having the port identifier of the port having received the fault notifying packet as the transmitting destination to the port identifier of the port connected to the other immediately adjacent repeater for the corresponding number of hops exceeding the number of hops in the fault section and also updates the corresponding number of hops to a value attained by subtracting the number of hops written into the transmitting port database from the total number of repeaters.