Method and apparatus for controlling traffic flow rate

#The present invention relates generally to a technology for controlling a traffic flow rate in a network. More particularly, the present invention relates to a technology for controlling a traffic flow rate of transferred data by considering a service level of the transferred data.

#In particular control of transfers of data through a network, the control is executed in dependence on an identified class of the data. A class of the transferred data is normally identified by a first router at an entrance of the network subjected to traffic management. An identifier is embedded in a ToS field (Refer to RFC 1493) of an IP header of the transmitted data. That is to say, in the network subjected to traffic management, the class of the transmitted data is identified on the basis of the embedded identifier. As a typical technique of executing band control in a network subjected to traffic management on the basis of such identifiers, there is known a model called DiffServ (Refer to RFCs 2474, 2475, 2597 and 2598). In this case, in the network subjected to traffic management, each transmitted data's attributes such as an IP address and an application are not taken into consideration at all in determining of the class of the data. In other words, the class of the transferred data is identified by using only a value embedded in the ToS field in order to execute transfer control suitable for the class.

#A system utilizing such a technology is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2001-244979. In this system, classes are used for identifying categories of rendered services and do not show priority levels of data transfers.

#FIG. 1 is a diagram showing a system configuration of an embodiment;

#FIG. 2 is a diagram showing an exemplified data format of resource information 201;

#FIG. 3 is a diagram showing exemplified resources identified by resource IDs;

#Preferred embodiments of the present invention will be described taking an example of Diffserv model into account with reference to the accompanying drawings below.

#FIG. 1 is a diagram showing a system configuration of an embodiment. An area enclosed by a dashed line in the figure is a network subjected to traffic management. As shown in the figure, the network includes routers 102 and meters 104. A router 102-1 is an edge router, which is a router connected to a terminal 105 utilized by an end user. On the other hand, a router 102-2 is a core router, which is a router not connected to the terminal 105. As shown in the figure, the routers 102 and the meters 104 are connected to each other by communication lines. In addition, one of the routers 102 is connected to a management server 101 by communication lines. The management server 101 is a computer connected to the network subjected to traffic management. The management server 101 collects traffic information from the meters 104 in the range of traffic management in order to set a flow-rate policy of traffic in each of the routers 102 in the range of traffic management. The management server 101 has an initialization data 112, an acquired-flow-rate data 113 and an all-flow-rate data 114 stored in storage devices of the management server 101. In addition, the management server 101 includes a initialization unit 106, a flow-rate-policy control unit 107, a flow-rate-policy-setting unit 108, a flow-rate-data display unit 109, a flow-rate aggregation unit 110 and a flow-rate acquisition unit 111 as configuration components implemented by software and/or hardware. Processing procedures of these configuration components are implemented by execution of programs by the management server 101 as will be described later in detail.

#The router 102 has the flow-rate-policy data 120 stored in the storage device employed in the router 102. The router 102 also has a data reception unit 115, an identification unit 116, a controller 117, a data transmission unit 118 and a control-policy-setting unit 119 as configuration components implemented by software and/or hardware. The control-policy-setting unit 119 receives flow-rate policy data from the management server 101 and stores the data in the flow-rate-policy data 120. The data reception unit 115 receives data flowing into the router 102. The identification unit 116 distributes pieces of received data to a plurality of queues in accordance with identifiers set in the data. The controller 117 determines a queue from which data is to be output and an output destination of the data in accordance with the contents of the flow-rate-policy data 120. The data transmission unit 118 sends out the data of the determined queue from the router 102. It is to be noted that a transmission apparatus including a routing controller as one of its components can be utilized as a substitute for the router 102 specially used for routing.