(12) United States Patent ao) Patent No.: us 6,711,172 Bi
Li (45) Date of Patent: Mar. 23,2004
(54) NETWORK PACKET ROUTING
(75) Inventor: Yunzhou Li, Lowell, MA (US)
(73) Assignee: Nortel Networks Corp. (CA)
( * ) Notice: Subject to any disclaimer, the term of this patent is extended or adjusted under 35 U.S.C. 154(b) by 0 days.
(21) Appl. No.: 09/366,136
(22) Filed: Aug. 2, 1999
(51) Int. CI.7 H04L 12/28; H04L 12/56
(52) U.S. CI 370/401; 370/432
(58) Field of Search 370/389, 400,
370/401, 351, 432, 475, 390, 230, 237;
709/230, 238, 241
(56) References Cited
U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS
5,241,682 A * 8/1993 Bryant 395/800
5,430,727 A * 7/1995 Callon 370/85.13
5,917,820 A * 6/1999 Rekhter 370/392
6,078,590 A * 6/2000 Farinacci 370/432
6,130,890 A * 10/2000 Leinwand 370/400
6,272,139 Bl * 8/2001 Soncodi 370/395
6,275,492 Bl * 8/2001 Zhang 370/392
6,331,983 Bl * 12/2001 Haggerty 370/400
6,473,421 Bl * 10/2002 Tappan 370/351
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
D. Estrin, D. Farinacci, A. Helmy, D. Thaler, S. Deering. M. Handley, V. Jacobson, C. Liu, P. Sharma and L. Wei, Protocol Independent Multicast-Sparse Mode (PIM-SM): Protocol Specification, Jun. 1998.
* cited by examiner
Primary Examiner—Ajit Patel
Assistant Examiner—Chirag Shah
(74) Attorney, Agent, or Firm—Steubing McGuinness & Manaras LLP
(57) ABSTRACT
A method of routing network packets to a border router joining different network domains includes defining a range of addresses for the border router in a router forwarding table, receiving a network packet, determining addresses included in the network packet, performing a search on the router forwarding table using the determined addresses, and transmitting the packet to the border router if the defined range of addresses matches for the determined addresses.
19 Claims, 12 Drawing Sheets
