Patent ID: 6922408

Claim:
A method for link-level flow control, comprising: establishing a plurality of logical links over a physical link between a transmitting entity and a receiving entity in a network; assigning to the logical links respective maximum limits of transmission credits, the credits corresponding to space available to the links in a dynamically allocable portion of a receive buffer at the receiving entity, such that a sum of the maximum limits for all of the logical links corresponds to an amount of space substantially larger than a total volume of the space in the dynamically allocable portion of the receive buffer; responsive to traffic from the transmitting entity to the receiving entity on a given one of the logical links, allocating one or more of the credits to the given logical link when it is determined that a total of the credits allocated to the given logical link is no greater than the respective maximum limit, and that a total of the credits allocated to all of the logical links together corresponds to an allocated volume that is no greater than the total volume of the space in the dynamically allocable portion of the receive buffer; controlling transmission of data over the given logical link responsive to the allocated credits; and allocating to the logical links respective static portions of the receive buffer so as to hold, in each of the static portions, only the data received over the respective link, wherein the dynamically allocable portion of the receive buffer comprises the portion of the buffer remaining after allocation of the static portions.