Patent ID: 7881192

Claim:
A system providing aggregate-rate services, comprising: a provider network, having an arbitrary topology; a plurality of customers; and a plurality of port nodes, comprising at least one aggregation-group, wherein each of the plurality of customers is associated with at least one of the plurality of port nodes to access the provider network, wherein the at least one aggregation-group guarantees an aggregate-rate, wherein port nodes in the at least one aggregation-group share capacity of the at least one aggregation-group fairly, wherein a service level agreement is provided, wherein the service level agreement provides that any port, in the at least one aggregation-group, having an offered rate, O i , greater than or equal to the current ingress-rate, I i , may increase its ingress-rate by as much as B during a next time interval, T, and wherein the at least one aggregation-group is created by a port node issuing a MARP_AGRP_REG primitive, wherein B is a minimum amount by which a value of an allowed rate, A i , for the next time interval should exceed the current value of I i when ramping of allowed-rates is performed, and wherein I i is the actual rate of traffic introduced by port i of an aggregation-group.