Patent ID: 7454504

Claim:
A device comprising: a traffic scheduler having one or more resources for use in forwarding network traffic received at the device at different rates; a classification engine configured to identify received network traffic based upon predefined criteria; and a resource reservation engine in communicating relationship with the traffic scheduler and the classification engine, wherein, in response to a request to reserve resources for a first data flow associated with a first session group identifier (ID) and belonging to a first session, the resource reservation engine is configured to, determine that the session group ID of the first data flow matches the session group ID of one or more second data flows, check if the one or more second data flows are already sharing resources with a third data flow having a session group ID that differs from the first session group ID, if so, direct the traffic scheduler to prevent resources reserved for the one or more second data flows from being shared with the first data flow, and if not, direct the traffic scheduler to share resources reserved for the one or more second data flows with the first data flow.