Method and apparatus for routing of best-effort and quality of service flows

Abstract

The present invention permits quality-of-service routing without using any flow pinning or per-flow state mechanisms. In accordance with the present invention, load insensitive routing techniques are utilized for QoS traffic while load sensitive routing techniques are utilized for best effort traffic. In accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention, conventional static shortest path routing is utilized for flows that require QoS guarantees while known QoS routing techniques are utilized for best effort flows. Unlike the prior art, a single queue per class per link can be utilized at a network node. The present invention has numerous advantages over the prior art including reduced protocol overhead, lower cost, and reduced route instability.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.