Abstract: A switching apparatus (and method and program storage device for storing the method) for receiving and transmitting data units each segmented into a series of cells of data, including a first cell and a last cell, each cell of a series including a label common to all cells of said series, includes at least one incoming port for receiving cells of a plurality of series at each incoming port, at least one outgoing port for transmitting cells out of the apparatus with an outbound label, a storage device for storing a series of cells received at each incoming port until the last cell of the series is received, and, a device for transmitting each of the series of cells sequentially from the first cell to the last cell from the storage device to a selected outgoing port. Each cell of each series has an outbound label common to all cells of the series, and all cells of each of the series are transmitted before transmitting any cells of other series having the same outbound label.

Abstract: This invention discloses a way to map IP or similar routing information onto a technology that uses label switching and swapping, such as ATM, without the need to change the network paradigm. This allows a network to continue to function and appear as a standard IP network, but with much higher performance. One of the requirements of IP networks is to decrement the IP packet Time-To-Live (TTL) field on each hop it traverses. Currently, switched packets within an ATM like network cannot decrement the TTL. This invention can decrement packet TTLs appropriately by maintaining a hop-count per each switched path. This hop-count maintains the total number of hops a packets would have traversed, had it been forwarded in the IP hop-by-hop model, rather than through the ATM like switched path. Before forwarding a packet on a switched path, an ingress ISR decrements the TTL by the hop-count. In this way, at the switched path exit point, the TTL is the same as if it had been forwarded by IP.

Abstract: In networks that use the label switching paradigm, labels are typically allocated to a "flow", where a flow is identified as an end-to-end connection between two or more user applications. This approach may quickly lead to exhaustion of the label space, because the number of user connections across a network is unbounded and hence can be too numerous. Moreover, this requires that the setup and teardown procedures be exercised for each user connection. This demands large amounts of resources (in terms of labels, memory and processing) from the network devices. An important objective of this inventive proposal is to reduce the consumption of labels in a network. Several methods are identified through which multiple flows that traverse the same network hops can use a single connection through the network to transport data from the ingress to the egress point of a network. In other words, the flows are "aggregated" onto a single connection from an ingress to an egress point of a network.

Abstract: IP based networks use a number of different IP routing protocols to determine how packets ought to be routed. However, due to the rapid growth of the Internet, there is a great need for higher packet forwarding performance. This invention describes a way to map IP routing information onto a technology that uses label switching and swapping, such as ATM, without the need to change the network paradigm. This allows a network to continue to function and appear as a standard IP network, but with much higher performance. In this invention, an Integrated Switch Router (ISR), is a switch that has been augmented with standard IP routing support. The ISR at an entry point to the switching environment performs standard IP forwarding of datagrams, but the "next hop" of the IP forwarding table has been extended to include a reference to a switched path (for example, the VCC in ATM technology).