High-speed WAN to wireless LAN gateway

摘要

A gateway interconnecting a high speed Wide Area Network (WAN) and a lower speed Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is provided. The high speed WAN is preferably connected to the gateway via a Fiber-to-the Home (FTTH) connection and associated FTTH modem. In general, the gateway includes an adaptable cross-layer offload engine operating to manage bandwidth between the high speed WAN and the lower speed WLAN. As data enters the gateway from the WAN at the high speed data rate of the WAN, the offload engine stores the data in a non-secure data cache. A rule check engine performs a stateless or stateful inspection of the data in the non-secure data cache. Thereafter, the data is moved from the non-secure data cache to a secure data cache and thereafter transmitted to an appropriate user device in the WLAN at the lower data rate of the WLAN.

主权项

1. A gateway interconnecting a first network to a second network comprising:
an offload engine that includes a number of protocol stack layers from a protocol stack of the gateway and is implemented in a cross-layer architecture enabling communication between non-adjacent layers in the protocol stack; a secure data cache associated with the offload engine; a non-secure data cache; a network interface communicatively coupling the offload engine to the first network and providing a first data rate; and an interface associated with the offload engine and adapted to communicate with a plurality of user devices within the second network, the interface providing a second data rate that is less than the first data rate of the network interface; wherein the offload engine is adapted to:
receive content from the first network via the network interface at the first data rate;store the content in the non-secure data cache such that the first data rate is supported by the gateway; andtransmit the content from the data cache to a corresponding one of the plurality of user devices in the second network via the interface at the second data rate.