Patent ID: 8098583

Claim:
A method of assigning network traffic for transmission in a multiple Quality of Service (QoS) network having network traffic paths over a plurality of links and having a plurality of scheduling mechanism classes corresponding to respective priority for classes of traffic over the links, the network traffic being subject to a QoS requirement of an associated Service Level Agreement (SLA), comprising: assigning network traffic to a lowest class of the plurality of scheduling mechanism classes; determining, for the network traffic assigned to the lowest scheduling mechanism class, if there are one or more network traffic paths that do not meet the QoS requirement of the SLA; determining a first one of the network traffic paths that most fails to meet the QoS requirement of the SLA; selecting a first link in the first one of the networks traffic paths; examining the selected link by: computing a result of re-assigning the traffic associated with the link to a higher scheduling mechanism class; determining whether the result of the traffic re-assignment is to cause the traffic over the link to meet the QoS requirement of the associated SLA; determining whether the result of the traffic re-assignment cause any other traffic to no longer meet the QoS requirement of the SLA; and repeating the link examining on a next link in the first one of the network paths if the result of the traffic re-assignment cause any other traffic to no longer meet the QoS requirement of the SLA; adopting a traffic re-assignment to a higher scheduling mechanism class determined by the link examining to cause traffic over the examined link to meet the QoS requirement of the SLA and to not cause any other traffic to no longer meet the QoS requirement; and transmitting network traffic over the network having the adopted traffic re-assignment to a higher scheduling mechanism class.