Patent ID: 7743401

Claim:
A method in an addressable tap for receiving signals and for providing a portion of the signals to an appropriate receiving device, the method comprising the steps of: receiving a plurality of signals, each of the plurality of signals including an address and a command that is associated with an attached receiving device; determining the correct attached receiving device by accessing a plurality of addresses stored in memory, wherein each address correlates with a port on the addressable tap; storing respective received commands as flags in a queue; and routing the portion of the signals to the appropriate receiving device, wherein a connect command is stored as a flag in the queue after two consecutive connect command transactions are received from a head end, and a disconnect command is stored as a flag in the queue after four consecutive disconnect command transactions are received from the head end, and a port refresh command is stored for later processing if a previously received command is currently processing, wherein a first received command for a first port is processed and a second received command for a second port different from the first port is buffered, using the flags in the queue, until the processing of the first received command is complete.