PROTECTING A NETWORK FROM A UNICAST FLOOD

An approach is provided for protecting a network from a unicast flood. If the destination MAC address of a frame is not included in a table of unknown MAC addresses, the MAC address is added to the table and the frame is forwarded to non-blocked spanning tree links to find the MAC address in the net...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Floyd, III, Robert K, Marica, Catalin Dumitru, Ling, James W, Hoffmann, Roger
Format: Patent
Sprache:eng
Schlagworte:
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Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:An approach is provided for protecting a network from a unicast flood. If the destination MAC address of a frame is not included in a table of unknown MAC addresses, the MAC address is added to the table and the frame is forwarded to non-blocked spanning tree links to find the MAC address in the network. If the MAC address is included in the table, and if a timer for suppressing forwarding of frames is active, the frame is discarded, or if the timer is inactive, a counter for counting received frames is incremented and compared to a threshold value. If the counter is greater than the threshold value, the timer is activated and the frame is discarded. If the counter is not greater than the threshold value, the frame is forwarded to the non-blocked spanning tree links to find the MAC address in the network.