APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR COLLECTING RESPONSES TO A PLURALITY OF PARALLEL LOOKUP QUERIES FROM A FLOW OF PACKETS AT A NETWORK SWITCH

摘要

A network lookup engine in a network switch is proposed, which is configured to generate multiple lookup requests/queries for each incoming packet in parallel to a remote search engine. The number and type of the lookup queries depend on the protocols supported by the network switch. The responses from the search engine arriving at the lookup engine, in most case, are not in the same order as the order of the packets. The network lookup engine is configured to collect the responses for the parallel lookup queries in two modes: 1) in-order mode in which the first packet having its lookup queries sent to the search engine has its responses collected first regardless of the order of the responses received from the search engine; 2) out-of-order mode in which the first packet having complete responses to its lookup queries from the search engine has its responses collected first regardless of the order of incoming packets.

主权项

1. A network lookup engine in a network switch, comprising:
a parallel queries generator configured to:
receive a flow of a plurality of incoming packets at the network switch;generate a plurality of lookup queries in parallel on a plurality of query lanes for each of the incoming packets;transmit the plurality of parallel lookup queries to a remote search engine, which processes and generates responses to the plurality of parallel lookup queries; a parallel responses collector configured to:
receive and store the responses to the parallel lookup queries from the search engine on a plurality of response lanes for the packets;collect valid responses to the parallel lookup queries for each of the packets.