The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
May. 12, 1998
Filed:
Dec. 28, 1995
Sunder Raj Rathnavelu, Marlboro, NJ (US);
Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, NJ (US);
Abstract
A scheduling mechanism for satisfying specified Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for each VC of an end-point host in an ATM network. The scheduling mechanism includes a time slot ring, a VC table and a pending queue. The time slot ring is an array, wherein each element represents a time slot. Each slot contains a pointer which contains the virtual channel identifier (VCID) which is to be serviced in this time slot. The VC table is an array of all the VC descriptors. The pending queue is used for queuing a new VC and also at a later time, when the scheduler is unable to find a time slot for a VC it is queued in the pending queue. The scheduler reads and processes one slot at a time at the maximum speed that the physical link will allow. The scheduler circularly services the slots in the ring continuously and a current slot pointer (CSP) points to the slot being serviced. For the current time slot, the scheduler first services the VC waiting on this slot, then schedules a new target time slot for this VC after marking the current slot empty. The target slot is calculated based on a cell-to-cell spacing parameter and a remainder mechanism is used to correct the average output cell rate to a required rate. In an alternate embodiment, the time slots within the ring are grouped into clusters. The ring contains cluster pointers which point to the first VC to be serviced. The rest of the VCs in the cluster are linked to the first VC. In order to accommodate different classes of service, each entry in the ring holds multiple cluster pointers.