MULTICOPY QUEUE STRUCTURE WITH SEARCHABLE CACHE AREA

摘要

An arrangement and a method of maintaining a count of the number of copies of a frame that have been transmitted from a network switch uses a cache memory to store the number of copies of a frame to be transmitted from the network switch. A queue is used to queue entries that indicate the transmission of a copy of a frame, and these queued entries are released to a buffer manager. Whenever a transmission is made of a copy of this frame, and the buffer manager examines the entry indicating this transmission after the entry leaves the queue, the buffer manager searches for a corresponding entry in the cache memory and changes the copy number (i.e., the count of the number of transmissions) of that frame in the cache memory.