International Business Machines Corporation

Vinod Gerard John Peris

Roch A Guerin

Dinesh C Verma

Arvind Krishna

Rajendran Rajan

Sanjay Damodar Kamat

Ping P Pan

A method of providing a rate guarantee to individual or groups of flows in a router through intelligent management of buffers. Rate guarantees are provided by intelligently allocating and isolating the buffers available to each flow. In its most basic form, the method applies to output queued network devices with a simple FIFO scheduler, where a number of streams some with rate reservations are sought to be multiplexed onto an outgoing link. The method involves strictly partitioning the buffer into portions strictly reserved for each flow in proportion to its link reservation. This ensures that each stream obtains the link reservation rate in a scalable manner. A particular embodiment of the invention allow for a portion of the buffer to be strictly partitioned while allowing streams full access to the remainder of the buffer. Other embodiments utilize the use of a link scheduler to divide bandwidth amongst a number of queues, while using buffer management to facilitate bandwidth amongst a number of flows in each queue.

Rate guarantees through buffer management

A method, apparatus and system is provided by which two or more cooperating end-users of the Internet and/or other network can dynamically select and use a single Internet or other network service provider (ISP) from among a multitude of ISPs based on the application requirements. The service provider may be selected in a dynamic fashion. This overcomes the problem wherein traditionally most end-users, whether they are individuals or organizations, are connected to the Internet or other network through a single Internet and/or other network service provider. However, users generally may have more than a single connection to the Internet and/or other network. In such cases the routing of traffic over these multiple connections is handled by IP routers based on the routing information that they exchange with their peers. This information is relatively static in nature and is typically based on the state of links that interconnect the different routers. The invention provides a mechanism for the end-user to take advantage of different rates or services that might be provided by competing Internet and/or other network service providers. Furthermore, there are cases where the choice of which provider to use depends on the application. Thus this invention enables cooperating users (or sites of an organization) to dynamically select different providers on an application by application basis.

Dynamic selection of network providers

Growing community of inventors

Chappaqua, NY, United States of America

Vinod Gerard John Peris