Dynamic traffic management on a shared medium
OwnerKrishna Pattabhiraman, Yahia El Kachab +3inventors
InventorsKrishna Pattabhiraman, Yahia El Kachab, Surya Kumar Kovvali, Ramji Raghavan, Charles W. Boyle
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Abstract
An approach for managing dynamic traffic on a shared medium, for example, on a SONET ring, makes use of a central arbiter that communicates with stations coupled to the medium. Each station makes requests to change bandwidth for dynamic traffic entering the medium at that station, and also implements a congestion avoidance algorithm that is coordinated with its requests for changes in bandwidth. The central arbiter responds to the requests from the stations to provide a fair allocation of bandwidth available on the shared medium.
Claims19
A method for managing communication on a shared medium with communication capacity that is shared by a plurality of communication channels comprising:
- admitting the communication channels for communicating over the shared medium, including assigning a priority to each of the channels;
- maintaining a data rate assignment for each of the communication channels such that a combination of the data rate assignments for the channels does not exceed the communication capacity of the shared medium;
- and
- passing data for the communication channels according to the data rate assignment for each of the communication channel, including for each of the communication channels, accepting data and transmitting the accepted data over the shared medium at a rate limited according to the data rate assignment for the communication channel;
- wherein maintaining the data rate assignments for the communication channels includes
- monitoring communication on the communication channels,
- generating requests to change data rate assignments for the communication channels using the monitored communication, wherein the requests to change the data rate assignments for each communication channel include requests to increase an assigned data rate for said channel and requests to decrease the assigned data rate for said channel, and
- repeatedly recomputing the data rate assignments using the received requests.
A communication system comprising:
- a shared medium having a communication capacity;
- a plurality of communication nodes coupled to the shared medium configured to pass data for a plurality of communication channels over the shared medium between the nodes;
- and
- an arbiter coupled to the communication nodes and configured to maintain a data rate assignment for each of the communication channels such that a combination of the data rate assignments for the channels does not exceed the communication capacity if the shared medium and to communicate said data rate assignments to the communication nodes;
- wherein each communication node is configured to accept data for one or more communication channels and to pass the data over the shared medium according to the data rate assignment for those communication channels, and is further configured to pass requests to change data rate assignments for the communication channels according to monitoring of communication on each of said communication channels;
- wherein the arbiter is further configured to determine a share of the communication capacity for each of a plurality of priorities, maintain the data rate assignments according to the determined shares for each priority and requests to change data rate assignments passed from the communication nodes.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.