System and method for searching patterns in real-time over a shared media

DETAILED DESCRIPTION It is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for performing real-time search of a bit pattern over a shared media supporting multiple simultaneous data streams each associated with a different program source.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide in an MPEG-2 packet Time Division Multiplexed transport system, a real-time data monitoring mechanism for data transfers occurring over a local bus that parses the MPEG-2 Transport Layer, removes MPEG-2 Transport Stream header and adaptation fields, searches the payload field for a specific pattern, and, identifies and indexes points where the search patterns occur.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide in an MPEG-2 packet transport system, a real-time data monitoring and pattern searching system that additionally tracks all the individual bit streams at a given time, and performs context switching in a transfer unit (burst) basis.
According to the principles of the invention, there is provided a system and method for providing real-time searching and indexing of patterns included in packets of a packet stream over a time-domain multiplexed shared media (e.
g.
, local bus, local area network, etc) and, particularly providing searching of several data streams transmitted over this shared media using a real-time search engine.
Given a set of data streams, where a data stream is characterized as a set of linked buffers (initially stored in a Packet Memory (30), for example, using a linked list data structure, and associated with a program stream using a unique identifier called the Queue Identifier (QID)), with each buffer capable of being transferred in blocks of variable block sizes over a shared media using a time-domain multiplexing (TDM) technique (e.
g.
, one block from data stream(i) is transmitted, then one block from data stream(j) is transmitted, and so forth), the real-time search engine is enabled to: capture each individual data transfer; parse the higher level protocol that encapsulates the payload; remove the transport layer header, and perform the pattern searching in the data stream payload