Patent ID: 7813279

Claim:
A system for rate management of communication services, comprising: a plurality of n ports, together forming an aggregation group sharing a guaranteed-rate G; and wherein each port in the aggregation-group determines an allowed-rate using at least one rate management policy, wherein the rate management policy comprises: assigning a weighting factor W i (i=1, . . . n), to each port in the aggregation-group; and determining the allowed-rate for each port in the aggregation-group using a rate-control method, wherein each local port is configured to perform the rate-control method, wherein the rate-control method comprises: computing the allowed-rate as MIN(I local , W local X)+W local B, if sum of the ingress-rates of the aggregation-group is greater than or equal to the guaranteed-rate, wherein X satisfies G≈ΣR i (for R i /W i <X)+ΣW i X (for R i /W i ≧X), B is an amount of rate increase, R i is an ingress-rate of port i received in a rate-message from port i, I local is an ingress-rate of the local port, and W local is the weighting factor of the local port.