Patent ID: 7904617

Claim:
A method that determines when the transmission of a frame of data over a network is complete, comprising: a network processor comprising a plurality of buffer control blocks, one for each of a plurality of data buffers, controlling a transmission of a frame of data by: receiving a frame of data; storing the frame of data in the plurality of data buffers; providing one each of the plurality of control blocks for each of the plurality of data buffers, wherein each of the control blocks includes: a first field that provides space for a start address of a next data buffer; a second field that provides space for an end address of the next data buffer; and a third field that provides space for a flag that indicates whether the data buffer is to be linked to the next data buffer; initially setting the flag of each of the control blocks to indicate that a corresponding data buffer is not linked to another data buffer; toggling the flag to indicate that the corresponding data buffer is to be linked to the next data buffer when the first and the second fields respectively include the start address and the end address; and determining when the transmission of the frame is complete based on the state of the flag.