Riverbed Technology, Inc.

Lap Nathan Trac

Steven McCanne

Andrew Swan

David Tze-Si Wu

Kand Ly

Alexei Potashnik

A method and apparatus are provided for scheduling a heterogeneous communication flow. A heterogeneous flow is a flow comprising packets with varying classes or levels of service, which may correspond to different priorities, qualities of service or other service characteristics. When a packet is ready for scheduling, it is queued in order in a flow queue that corresponds to the communication flow. The flow queue then migrates among class queues that correspond to the class or level of service of the packet at the head of the flow queue. Thus, after the head packet is scheduled, the flow queue may be dequeued from its current class queue and requeued at the tail of another class queue. If the subsequent packet has the same classification, it may be requeued at the tail of the class queue or may remain in place for another servicing round.

Method and apparatus for scheduling a heterogeneous communication flow

Network devices include hosted virtual machines and virtual machine applications. Hosted virtual machines and their applications implement additional functions and services in network devices. Network devices include data taps for directing network traffic to hosted virtual machines and allowing hosted virtual machines to inject network traffic. Network devices include unidirectional data flow specifications, referred to as hyperswitches. Each hyperswitch is associated with a hosted virtual machine and receives network traffic received by the network device from a single direction. Each hyperswitch processes network traffic according to rules and rule criteria. A hosted virtual machine can be associated with multiple hyperswitches, thereby independently specifying the data flow of network traffic to and from the hosted virtual machine from multiple networks. The network device architecture also enables the communication of additional information between the network device and one or more virtual machine applications using an extended non-standard network protocol.

Network traffic processing according to network traffic rule criteria and transferring network traffic metadata in a network device that includes hosted virtual machines

A method for configuring service curves for managing the output port of a networking device includes the following steps. A multitude of traffic classes is defined, each traffic class being characterized by a bandwidth and a delay priority. A multitude of traffic service curves is computed, each of the plurality of traffic service curves is associated with a different one of the multitude of traffic classes. At least one of the multitude of traffic classes service curves is characterized by a shifted two-piece linear function shifted such that the service curve limits service to during a nonzero time period prior to the start of the two-piece linear function.

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Lap Nathan Trac