Quality of service for inbound network traffic flows during slow-start phases

Abstract

An edge network device controls the quality-of-service of incoming network traffic flows by limiting the bandwidth of incoming network traffic flows to create a network traffic bottleneck at the edge network device. The bottleneck ensures that this edge network device may control the quality-of-service of incoming network traffic flows. During a slow-start phase of a network traffic flow, the edge network device adds phantom network packets to a scheduler queue in addition to the actual packets of the network traffic flow. Phantom packets occupy transmission slots during packet scheduling and are discarded when selected for transmission. This limits the rate that actual packets are received and acknowledged by the destination knowledge, thereby preventing the network traffic flow source from increasing the flow bandwidth above the limit of the inbound network connection.