Patent ID: 7631096

Claim:
A bandwidth provisioning method based on one or more quality of service levels (QoS), defined by one or more policies governing the transmission of protocol data units through a plurality of switching devices comprising the steps of: (a) appending an inter-switching device label comprising a timestamp to the protocol data unit (PDU) segment at a first switching device, the first switching device comprising a plurality of queues characterized by one or more QoS properties; (b) buffering the PDU segment in one of the plurality of queues; (c) conveying the PDU segment to a second switching device; (d) determining via a fragmentation module to parse the PDU into fragments based on priority queues associated with a different level of priority with a unique QoS, wherein a plurality of QoS policies are applied, the plurality of QoS policies including bandwidth requirements, maximum jitter, queue delay, transit delay, preference and frequency with which a packet is distributed to the switch fabric; (i) determining, using the timestamp, an observed delay for the PDU segment to propagate between the first switching device and the second switching device; and (ii) altering at least one of the one or more QoS properties from the second switching device depending on the observed delay.