Patent ID: 7710871

Claim:
In a packet forwarding device, a method comprising: monitoring bandwidth consumption by one or more types of packet traffic received in the packet forwarding device comprising determining a measure of bandwidth consumption in the packet forwarding device due to traffic associated with a physical port on the forwarding device; determining whether the bandwidth consumption by the one or more types of packet traffic exceeds a threshold; and automatically changing assignment of at least one type of packet traffic of the one or more types of packet traffic from a queue having a first priority to a queue having a second priority if the bandwidth consumption computed based on an evaluation of traffic statistics substantially in real-time exceeds the threshold, the traffic statistics include at least one of (i) a number of packets destined for particular egress ports, (ii) a number of packets destined for particular MAC addresses, (iii) a number of packets destined for a particular virtual local area network, (iv) a number of packets having a particular IP protocol, (v) a number of errors associated with different classes of traffic, and (vi) a number of packets from each class of traffic that are dropped.