Patent ID: 7065089

Claim:
A method of mediating cell traffic between an asynchronous transmission mode (ATM) network and an adjacent network, each cell in said cell traffic having a set of transmission parameters related to said ATM network and a respective ATM connection for said cell, said method comprising: (i) identifying for said cell an egress queue family by utilizing a first set of parameters from said set of transmission parameters; (ii) associating with said cell one of a predefined number of egress class of service (COS) levels by mapping a second set of parameters from said set of transmission parameters into one of said egress COS levels; (iii) utilizing said egress COS level associated with said cell to select an egress queue member of said egress queue family identified in step (i), said selected egress queue member being associated with said egress COS level associated with said cell in step (ii); and (iv) providing said cell to said identified queue member for forwarding to said another network; wherein said first set of parameters comprises a real-time connection indication and a resource reserved indication; wherein said second set of parameters comprises at least an ATM quality of service parameter and a service category parameter; wherein for said second set of parameters, said ATM quality of service parameter comprises a cell loss ratio parameter and a cell delay variation parameter; wherein said egress queue family in step (i) is one of a real-time (R-T) queue family, a resources reserved (RR) queue family, and a non-resources reserved (nRR) queue family; and, wherein said RR queue family comprises eight RR queue members, each said RR queue member having a minimum bandwidth proportional to a weight assigned to each egress COS level associated with each said RR queue.