Congestion indication for flow control
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorPatrick L. Connor
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method, apparatus, and signal-bearing medium for indicating and responding to congestion in a network. When a buffer at a receiver is nearly full, the receiver may send a congestion indication to the sender(s) that is causing the congestion. When the receiver(s) receives the congestion indication, it may implement a flow-control technique to temporarily lower the rate that it is sending the frames to the receiver, and then increase the rate.
Claims26
A method comprising:
- determining that a received frame causes a buffer to exceed a threshold;
- determining an end-point to receive a congestion-indication frame in response to the exceeded threshold;
- building the congestion-indication frame, wherein the congestion-indication frame indicates that future frames should temporarily be sent at a lower rate;
- and
- sending the congestion-indication frame to a link-partner.
A signal-bearing medium bearing a data structure, comprising:
- an identifier field to identify that a first end-point is congested;
- a data-link-layer flow control field to indicate that an electronic device is to pause sending frames to the receiving end-point;
- a data-link-layer flow control valid-indicator field to indicate whether the data-link-layer flow control field is valid;
- and
- a throughput-capability field to indicate a link speed of the first end-point.
An apparatus, comprising:
- a media access controller to receive a frame from a first end-point, determine that the frame contains pause information, invalidate the pause information in the frame, and pause sending future frames to the first end-point.
A signal-bearing medium bearing instructions, which when read and executed by an electronic device comprise:
- sending frames to a receiver;
- receiving a congestion indication;
- and
- sending future frames to the receiver at a lower rate for a period of time in response to the congestion indication.
An apparatus comprising:
- a first end-point to determine that an amount of data in a buffer has exceeded a threshold and build a congestion-indication frame comprising pause information;
- and
- a link partner to receive the congestion-indication frame from the first end-point, invalidate the pause information in the congestion-indication frame, and send the congestion-indication frame to a second end-point.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.