Decision making engine receiving and storing a portion of a data frame in order to perform a frame forwarding decision

摘要

A network switch configured for switching data packets across multiple ports uses an external memory to store data frames. When a data frame is transmitted to the external memory, a frame header portion of the data frame is stored on the switch for processing by decision making logic. The switch memory is configured to store a number of the frame headers corresponding to each port on the switch along with frame pointer information indicating the location in the external memory where the data frame is stored.