Patent ID: 7590753
Filing Date: 2009-09-15
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A method for operating a packet based data network, the data network comprising a multitude of nodes and a shared data bus, wherein at least some of the nodes add traffic to the data bus, and wherein with respect to a data flow in one direction of the data bus, the upstream nodes reserve data transfer capacity of the data bus for downstream nodes by means of a fairness mechanism that applies anti-tokens at the nodes which add traffic to the data bus, wherein at least some of the nodes drop traffic from the data bus, said fairness mechanism takes into account the traffic to be dropped at downstream nodes, wherein traffic to be added at a node is split into logical paths where each logical path corresponds to a destination node of the added traffic, the fairness mechanism being applied to each logical path to determine the data transfer capacity available at a node for the respective logical paths, where the data bus is a single communication channel connected to each node that carries all traffic on all of the logical paths, wherein the anti-tokens forbid a node to emit data traffic for a given amount of time, thus preserving traffic voids for nodes located downstream to define reserved data capacity based on data transfer capacity available for the logical paths.