Devices and cell rate how it is minimum guaranteed

摘要

A method and apparatus for providing a minimum per-connection banwidth guarantee and the ability to employ shared bandwidth thereabove in an environment having both virtual-connection and link-level flow control. A buffer pool (28) downstream of a transmitter (12) and disposed in a receiver (14) is divided among a first portion dedicated for allocated bandwidth cell traffic (300) and a second portion for dynamic bandwidth cell traffic (128). Link flow control enables the receiver buffer (28) sharing while maintaining the per-connection bandwidth guarantee. No cell-loss due to buffer overflows at the receiver (14) is also guaranteed, resulting in high link-utilization in a frame traffic environment, as well as low delay in the absence of cell retransmission. A higher and thus more efficient utilization of receiver cell buffers (28) is achieved.