Patent ID: 7027410

Claim:
A method for maintaining consistent per-hop packet forwarding behavior among a plurality of network devices in a network within a Differentiated Services (DS) domain, comprising the computer-implemented steps of: creating and storing a network-wide per-hop forwarding behavior (PHB) definition that associates a PHB with a DS code point (DSCP) value, and with a set of parameters that define the bandwidth and buffer resources allocated to the PHBs on all interfaces of network devices within the DS domain; determining a mapping of one or more of the PHBs in the network-wide PHB definition to one or more queues of the network devices; determining a drain size and a queue size for each of the queues to which PHBs are mapped; determining a mapping of each of the PHBs to a threshold value associated with the queues; and determining parameters of fragmentation and interleave mechanism for the device interfaces.