Patent ID: 7346000

Claim:
A traffic management processor for independently throttling the bandwidth of individual traffic flows to alleviate network congestion, comprising: an instruction decoder having an input to receive a throttle control instruction identifying a flow identification (ID) of a particular traffic flow to be throttled in response to network congestion, and having an output to provide a throttle enable signal; a departure time calculator (DTC) circuit coupled to the instruction decoder and having an input to receive the throttle enable signal and configured to calculate a departure time for the incoming packet in response to size and bandwidth parameters associated with the incoming packet, wherein the DTC circuit is configured to selectively adjust the bandwidth parameter by a bandwidth multiplier factor (BMF) in response to the throttle enable signal to selectively delay the departure time of the incoming packet; a content addressable memory (CAM) device having a plurality of rows, each for storing the flow ID for a corresponding packet and a traffic type indicator (TTI) for the corresponding packet.