FAST LOOKUP AND UPDATE OF CURRENT HOP LIMIT

摘要

In order to facilitate efficient and scalable lookup of current hop limits of transmitted packets, a communications device embeds hop limit values along with other connection parameters in a connection data structure. To transmit a packet for a particular connection, the communications device retrieves the data structure for the particular connection and applies the hop limit value embedded in the data structure to the packet for transmission. To keep track of the hop limits being embedded in different data structures of different connections, the communications device use a binary search in which each node of the search tree correspond to a different connection. The communications device maintains one such search tree per communications interface.

主权项

1. A method for transmitting packets from a communications device, the method comprising:
traversing a search tree to locate a node that corresponds to a particular connection, wherein the search tree comprises a plurality of nodes, each node pointing to a data structure of a corresponding connection; updating a copy of a particular parameter that is cached in the data structure pointed to by the located node; transmitting a data packet for the particular connection by retrieving said data structure for the particular connection and inserting the updated copy of the particular parameter into the data packet.