Patent ID: 8472312

Claim:
A stacked switch using a resilient packet ring protocol comprising: a plurality of switch modules coupled together, and a switch module of the plurality of switch modules having a plurality of external terminals to interface with one or more external devices, where the switch module includes: an external interface to communicate via the plurality of external terminals using a communication protocol; and an internal interface to communicate with one or more other switch modules of the plurality of switch modules; a master processor, coupled to one or more of the plurality of switch modules, to provide instructions regarding communication of information between the external interface and the internal interface of the switch module and to control data flow, the master processor being configured to introduce first marker information and second marker information into the data flow to facilitate a handover between a plurality of ports, wherein the first marker information includes a plurality of marker frames, each of the plurality of marker frames being provided to a corresponding one of the plurality of ports, and wherein each of the plurality of ports have an associated priority level, and the second marker information includes a protocol data unit (PDU) marker frame, the PDU marker frame being provided to a port of the plurality of ports having a highest priority level of the associated priority levels; a slave processor, coupled to the master processor through one or more switch modules under a master-slave relationship, to implement the instructions from the master processor; and a link aggregation port that is controlled by the master processor or the slave processor to aggregate at least some of the plurality of switch modules based at least in part upon statistics associated with at least a part of the data flow.