SCALABILITY OF PROVIDING PACKET FLOW MANAGEMENT

摘要

Systems and methods for managing packet flows in a communication network are provided. Packet information can be cached on different levels and used to avoid external queries. The cache information can also be correlated with other types of information, such as location information, to be able to serve that information quicker than if one or more external queries were to be made. A demux manager can provide routing and session setup, by routing packets that already have a session to the session manager and assigning packets to a session manager if they are not already assigned to a session. The tiered architecture also provides scalability to many users and minimizes delays even during high call volumes because the load can be distributed well across the gateway's resources.

主权项

1. A gateway in a communication network for communicating with users and for routing incoming packets comprising:
one or more process instances each of which is configured to route incoming packets to destination addresses; a network processing unit (NPU) configured to determine if the incoming packets match information cached at the NPU; and a demux manager configured to determine if the incoming packets match information cached at the demux manager; wherein the NPU is configured to route the incoming packets to a process instance indicated by the information cached at the NPU if the incoming packets match information cached at the NPU, and to route the incoming packets to the demux manager if the incoming packets do not match information cached at the NPU; and wherein the demux manager is configured to: (i) route the incoming packets to a process instance indicated by the information cached at the demux manager if the incoming packets match information cached at the demux manager, (ii) assign the incoming packets to a new process instance if the incoming packets do not match information cached at the demux manager, and (iii) dynamically add new process instances depending on load information of at least some of the one or more process instances.