Patent ID: 8891363

Claim:
A system pausing data flow comprising: an input buffer; a hop-1 buffer coupled to the input buffer; a hop-2 buffer comprising a plurality of queues, each queue associated with data of a particular Quality of Service (QOS) level, the hop-2 buffer coupled to the hop-1 buffer; and a host flow controller coupled to the input buffer and coupled to the plurality of queues, wherein the host flow controller is configured to: transfer data packets from the input buffer to the hop-1 buffer; classify the transferred data packets according to a QOS level of the data packets; transfer the classified data packets from the hop-1 buffer to a queue in the hop-2 buffer; and generate a selective pause to suspend the transmission of data of a selected QoS level to a first of the plurality of queues associated with the selected QoS level and to generate a frame to restart transmission of data of the selected QoS level to the first of the plurality of queues associated with the selected QoS level, based on the amount of data present in the first of the plurality of queues.