Patent ID: 7483378
Filing Date: 2009-01-27
Classification: H04L,Y02D

Abstract:
1. An edge switch located at an edge of a packet communication network, said packet communication network being constructed from at least one router, and said edge switch being connected to at least two terminals via physical lines, respectively, said edge switch comprising a layer switch having a function for transferring outgoing packets, output from said terminals, onto said packet communication network by appending to said outgoing packets line identifiers respectively assigned to said physical lines, said line identifiers being different from each other or being shared among said physical lines, and a function for selecting, upon reception of an incoming packet from said packet communication network, one of said terminals connected to one of said physical lines specified by one of said line identifiers and a destination address, and for transferring said incoming packet to a selected one of said terminals after removing said one of said line identifiers, said edge switch further comprising: a packet buffer which buffers said outgoing packet for each of said line identifiers as said outgoing packet is output from said layer switch; a token bucket which holds tokens therein; and a token bucket control unit which varies the amount of tokens flowing into said token bucket per unit time in accordance with a congestion condition of said packet communication network, wherein an output amount defining a rate at which said outgoing packet stored in said buffer is output onto said packet communication network is controlled in accordance with the amount of tokens held in said token bucket, thereby adjusting for each of said line identifiers an output rate of said outgoing packet to be output onto said packet communication network.