Method and apparatus for managing congestion in a data communication network

Abstract

A method for managing data congestion and / or contention occurring at a point-of-traffic concentration. The method includes reading a time value associated with a data packet, the time value being representative of when the data packet entered the network. The time value is within the header of the data packet. The age of the data packet is determined from the time value. The data packet is discarded if the age of the data packet is above a threshold value. Alternatively, a first time value determined from a time reference is associated with a data packet at a first node. The data packet is transmitted to a second node and the first time value is compared to a second time value to provide a result. The second time value is also determined from the time reference. The data packet is discarded if the result exceeds a threshold value.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates generally to communication systems, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for preventing and correcting datagram congestion and contention at a point-of-traffic concentration of a communication system. Background technique [0002] In fact, any network communication system must deal with contention or possible congestion of data traffic. For example, a local area network (LAN) using a traffic concentration point may experience contention when receiving data from multiple sources (i.e., ingress sources) that are attempting to send (i.e., egress) data through a single port or on a single wire and crowded. Each line is limited by the bandwidth of the throughput it can handle. Much data is time sensitive, making such data have hard real-time or near-real-time deadlines. That is, within about 10 to 1000 microseconds, the data becomes stale and worthless. In addition, any network that supports connectionless messag...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

The disadvantages of using the TTL field are: 1) the resolution can only be in seconds, because the IPv4 standard has not yet begun to be used to transmit real-time data, 2) the accuracy is only accurate enough to handle the delay of each hop, and 3) the entire network has a good understanding of the data The incoming time of the packet has not been synchronized, which is usually necessary to monitor the age of the datagram in the LAN

Furthermore, many systems incur a per-connection fee relative to the number of backhaul connections

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