COORDINATED BACKOFF FOR HYBRID NETWORK PATH SELECTION

摘要

A coordinated back-off mechanism for automatic path selection for minimizing race conditions in hybrid communication networks is disclosed. A network device determines a stream medium utilization associated with packet streams for each priority class and network interface of a plurality of communication devices (including the network device). For each priority class and network interface, the communication devices are ranked according to the stream medium utilization. In response to determining that a medium utilization of a network interface exceeds a corresponding threshold, the network device determines whether one of its network interfaces originates a packet stream with the greatest stream medium utilization value for a selected priority class. If so, path selection operations are executed to reduce the medium utilization associated with network interface below the medium utilization threshold. Otherwise, a back-off period is calculated based on the ranking associated with the network device for the selected priority class.