Patent ID: 7177273

Claim:
A data communication system comprising a communication medium providing a bandwidth for communication; a plurality of communicating nodes, the nodes sharing access to the bandwidth with each other on the basis of contention, each node comprising a regulator for regulating an amount of the bandwidth that the node will attempt to use for transmissions, at least part of the nodes being arranged for reserving a guaranteed amount of the bandwidth for quality of service transmissions; and a controller arranged to compute a respective amount of assigned bandwidth for each node based on a ratio between the current bandwidth demand of that node of the nodes and a total combined current bandwidth demand of the nodes so as to track an on-line predicted demand for bandwidth of that node, the sum of the amounts of assigned bandwidth not exceeding a total available amount of bandwidth minus the amount of guaranteed bandwidth reserved for quality of service transmissions, the controller setting the regulator of each node so as to prevent the node from attempting to use more than the amount of assigned bandwidth for that node for transmissions other than quality of service transmissions.