METHOD OF STACKING MULTIPLE DEVICES TO CREATE THE EQUIVALENT OF A SINGLE DEVICE WITH A LARGER PORT COUNT

摘要

An apparatus provides an integrated single chip solution to solve Switching/Bridging, Security, Access Control, Bandwidth Management - Quality of Service issues, Roaming - Clean Hand off, Anticipatory Load Management. Location Tracking, Support for Revenue Generating Services - Fine grain Qos, Bandwidth Control, Billing and management. The architecture is such that it not only resolves the problems pertinent to WLAN it is also scalable and useful for building a number of useful networking products that fulfill enterprise security and wired and wireless networking needs. In accordance with a further aspect of the invention, the architecture supports stacking so as to enable the combining of two or more devices to create the equivalent of a single device with a larger port count, depending on system needs and preferences, while also providing support for services such as trunking, mirroring and QoS across all the ports.