Method and apparatus for policing and buffering a bursty data signal

摘要

In order to improve policing and buffering of bursty data streams, the present invention provides a method and related apparatus for buffering a burst mode data signal containing formatted data units. In a traffic manager (10), a policer (11) classifies the data units into data units below a committed information rate (CIR) and data units above the committed information rate (CIR). Policed data units will then be stored in a buffer memory (13). A buffer control (15) monitors the filling level of the buffer memory (13) and upon the buffer memory (13) approaching to become full and one or more new data units below the committed information rate are received, discards data units above the committed information rate from the buffer memory (13) to free memory space for storing the new data units below the committed information rate. Preferably, buffer memory (13) is structured into at two queues (13a, 13b), a first queue (13a) for data units below the committed information rate and a second queue (13b) for data units above the committed information rate. The buffer control (15) adjusts the size of the queues dynamically in dependence of the amount of data units received.