METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PRE-CLASSIFYING PACKETS

• US 20160277549A1
• Filed: 05/31/2016
• Published: 09/22/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 03/21/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Marvell Asia Pte Limited (Marvell Technology Group Limited)
• Original Assignee: Marvell World Trade Limited (Marvell Technology Group Limited)
• Inventors: Zeffer, Hakan, Carlstrom, Jakob, Westlund, Par, Back, Johan, Nilsson, Ronny
• Granted Patent: US 10,462,267 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/70 Routing based on monitoring results
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/74 Address processing for routing
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/2441 relying on flow classification, e.g. using integrated services [IntServ]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/10 in which an application is distributed across nodes in the network software deployment G06F8/60; multiprogramming arrangements G06F9/46
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/22 Parsing or analysis of headers

Abstract

The disclosed embodiments relate to a system that provides an intelligent port infrastructure for communication network devices. This is accomplished by incorporating a highly configurable pre-classifier module into the port infrastructure. This pre-classifier makes it possible to realign packet data to add a configurable number of bytes to the front of the packet, and also to select interesting data from incoming packets for further analysis. The selected data is sent into a configurable classification engine, which generates instructions that specify how to determine associated packet attributes. The packet attributes are then generated based on the instructions, and are forwarded along with the packet to downstream processing units.

Claims

1. A method for processing a packet, comprising:

receiving a packet from an input port;

selecting data from one or more locations in the packet;

performing a classification operation based on the selected data to generate a classification result including instructions specifying how to generate attributes for the packet;

using the instructions from the classification result to generate attributes for the packet; and

forwarding the attributes along with the packet to facilitate subsequent packet-processing operations.