Transparent bridging support in high speed interworking units

Abstract

The emerging data rates in high speed networks impose increasingly high performance requirements on inter-working units. Novel architectural concepts providing a high degree of parallelism are needed for the implementation of multiport transport bridges interconnecting gigabit speed networks. The modular architecture of the High Performance Transparent Bridge (HPTB) is based on an internal switching component interconnecting various concurrently operating network attachment units. The bridge protocol entitles are properly partitioned and performance critical tasks, such as management of the filtering data base and buffer management, are provided with special hardware support. The HPTB is capable of concurrently bridging asynchronous, synchronous and isochronous traffic among heterogeneous networks, including traditional frame-based networks, such as LANs, and cell-based networks using ATM technology.