HIERARCHICAL ADDRESS TRANSLATION SYSTEM FOR A NETWORK SWITCH

摘要

A network switch (12) includes an hierarchical address translation system for relating network addresses of stations to receive incoming transmissions to the switch ports. The transmission system includes a central translation unit (26) and local translation units (44). Each local translation unit (44) contains a local cache memory (100) for storing a smaller subset of the mapping entries stored in the central translation unit (26).