Method and apparatus for operating the internet protocol over a high-speed serial bus

Abstract

A method and apparatus of integrating the IEEE 1394 protocol with the IP protocol in which the IEEE 1394 high speed serial bus operates as the physical and link layer medium and the IP operates as the transport layer. There are differences in the protocols which require special consideration when integrating the two protocols. The IEEE 1394 configures packets with memory information and the IP operates under channel based I / O thereby necessitating a modification of the data transfer scheme to accomplish IP transfers over the IEEE 1394. Further, due to differences in packet headers, the IEEE 1394 packet header is modified to encapsulate IP packets. Moreover, in order to determine network packets quickly and efficiently, an identifier is inserted in each network packet header indicating that the packet should be processed by the network. Finally, in order to support the ability to insert or remove nodes on the network without a loss of data, the IP interface must not be disturbed. This is accomplished by maintaining constant IP addresses across bus resets which are caused by insertion or removal of nodes from the network.

Description

[0001] A. Field of the Invention[0002] This invention relates to the operation of a high speed data network which interconnects different application modules, and more particularly relates to a method and apparatus for operating IP protocol over a high-speed bus such as an IEEE 1394 high-speed bus.[0003] B. Description of Related Art[0004] When communication is necessary among heterogeneous systems (i.e. different vendors and standards), the software to communicate between the systems can be extremely difficult to develop. The potential exists for different vendors to use different data formats and data exchange conventions so that the differing machines are unable to "talk" directly to each other. To combat this potential problem, standardizing organizations have established computer architectures and structures to facilitate the communication between heterogeneous systems. One accepted structuring technique is layering. The communications functions are partitioned into a vertical ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0021] Another object of the invention is to provide a means for inserting or removing nodes from a network at any level in the computer architecture without disturbing the on-going traffic on other nodes in the network.

[0023] Still yet another object of the invention is to efficiently and correctly determine whether to process incoming packets of data.

Problems solved by technology

When communication is necessary among heterogeneous systems (i.e. different vendors and standards), the software to communicate between the systems can be extremely difficult to develop.

However, there are several problems when integrating the IEEE 1394 protocols with the protocols.

First, there are differences in the protocols between the sender and the receiver of data.

As such, the data transfers of IP cannot be directly accomplished on the IEEE 1394 architecture.

Second, the packet formats of the IEEE 1394 are incompatible with the IP packet formats.

Third, there are addressing problems when using the IP protocol as the transport protocol for data transfers over the IEEE 1394 bus.

However, most ARP implementations cannot support the dynamic changing of the hardware address and therefore cannot be used on an IEEE 1394 bus.

Further, the requirement of broadcasting an ARP inquiry and the address resolution latency are undesirable.

However, the data can only be buffered for a finite period of time due to physical constraints in terms of memory requirements on the buffers and due to specification constraints in terms of the requirements of some protocols to process a packet of information within a certain period of time.

Another problem when integrating various heterogeneous systems is determining whether the data formats conform to a certain standard or a certain computer architecture.

Otherwise, data might be lost.

There are several problems with this scheme.

First, the determination whether to process the packet is fairly intensive in terms of deciding whether specific fields in the packet conform to the IP protocol.

Second, a component can still be "fooled" into believing that a packet does conform to a certain protocol simply because the packet falls within the bounds of that protocol.

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