Order preserving transmission of data streams.

摘要

Data transmission in a network over two or more parallel links (link 1 . . . link n) between two network nodes (1 and 2), a so-called transmission group, usually requires (if the transmission protocol has no other way to solve the order issue) to preserve the order of the data frames within a data stream if switching from one link to the other occurs within a data stream, or, in other words, if a data stream is switched from one link to another. Two novel approaches are disclosed. a. The first method achieves the order preservation by numbered switch frames (4) that have to be exchanged between the nodes before the link switching is actually performed. a. In the second method, the switching is only prepared by exchanging special frames which indicate "clean" links. Actual switching takes place by just using an already prepared. i.e. "clean" link. <IMAGE>