Patent ID: 8811184

Claim:
A bandwidth management system for allocating bandwidth between a plurality of bandwidth zones at an establishment serving a plurality of users, each zone having a number of users competing for bandwidth allocated to the zone, wherein the number of users in each zone changes over time; the bandwidth management system comprising: a plurality of queues, wherein each of the zones has a corresponding queue; an enqueuing module for receiving network traffic from one or more incoming network interfaces, determining a belonging zone to which the network traffic belongs, and enqueuing the network traffic on a queue corresponding to the belonging zone; a dequeuing module for selectively dequeuing data from the queues and passing the data to one or more outgoing network interfaces; and a quantum manager for dynamically adjusting values of a plurality of quantums, each of the queues having a respective quantum associated therewith; wherein, when a selected queue has no guaranteed bandwidth rate or has already reached its guaranteed bandwidth rate, the dequeuing module dequeues at most an amount of data from the selected queue up to the quantum of the selected queue before dequeuing data from another of the queues; the quantum manager dynamically adjusts the values of the quantums in proportion to the number of users in each of the zones as the number of users change over time; the values of the quantums being automatically adjusted such that the quantum of a first queue is a higher value than the quantum of a second queue while the zone to which the first queue corresponds has a higher number of users than the zone to which the second queue corresponds, and such that the quantum of the first queue is a lower value than the quantum of the second queue while the zone to which the first queue corresponds has a lower number of users than the zone to which the second queue corresponds; at least one of the zones is a first-level zone that includes a plurality of second-level zones not entitled to any guaranteed bandwidth rate; network traffic enqueued on one or more queues corresponding to the second-level zones is dequeued and then enqueued on the queue corresponding to the first-level zone; and the quantum manager determines the number of users of the first-level zone by accumulating the number of users under each of the second-level zones.