A scalable, high-resolution asynchronous transfer mode traffic shaper and method

摘要

An ATM network traffic shaper is implemented in hardware. The traffic shaper shapes transmit data on one or more virtual circuits (VCs) according to the specified quality of service (QoS) parameters. Thus, the traffic shaper provides for the delivery of associated data cells in accordance with the specified QoS parameters. The traffic shaper is scalable in that the number of supported VCs can be increased with a relatively small increase in the size of the device and associated logic gates. The traffic shaper supports constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate (VBR), and unknown bit rate (UBR) service types and generates cell transmit requests with zero cell delay variation (CDVT). The traffic shaper also provides very high resolution in terms of bit rate specification. Varying shaping resolutions are achieved by varying a shaping interval time (SIT) generated by a SIT counter.