Patent ID: 8000235

Claim:
A system for bandwidth assignment to manage congestion over a network bottleneck, the system comprising a regulation point being set up downstream of said bottleneck in said network to manage congestion in data packets arriving from at least two sources via said bottleneck, the system comprising, for each of said at least two sources, a priority level assigner for assigning priority levels to respective data packets, and at least one token bucket for assigning tokens at a limiting rate to said prioritized data packets, said tokens allowing passage of packets to which they are assigned, said token bucket being a multi-priority token bucket having at least two thresholds corresponding to priority levels assignable to packets, and said token bucket assigning a token to an arriving packet having a respective priority level if there are sufficient tokens currently in said bucket to reach a one of said thresholds corresponding to said respective priority level, wherein said at least one token bucket is arranged to define an overall bandwidth, said overall bandwidth being lower by a finite margin than a maximum bottleneck bandwidth, wherein said at least one token bucket is configured to supply a quantity of tokens, the quantity being selected to define said overall bandwidth.