Patent ID: 7885186

Claim:
A method of adaptively managing bandwidth among a plurality of services contending for bandwidth on an optical link having a bandwidth capacity, the method comprising: allocating bandwidth to each service contending for bandwidth of the optical link; computing for each service a utilization metric representing a measure of current usage of a maximum allowed bandwidth for that service, the utilization metric determined by dividing an average number of frames per second by a maximum number of frames per second allocated to the service; computing for each service a current utilization metric representing a measure of current usage of the allocated bandwidth by that service; and allocating additional bandwidth to one of the services in response to the current utilization metric of that service if bandwidth usage of the optical link is currently at less than full capacity, otherwise balancing the bandwidth allocation between the services in response to the current utilization metric of at least one of the services if the bandwidth usage of the optical link is currently at full capacity, such that the utilization metrics of the services are made approximately equal to each other.