Patent ID: 7817558

Claim:
A method comprising: detecting packet congestion in a network device that includes a switch and a plurality of components, the plurality of the components being configured to transmit packets to the switch; in response to detecting packet congestion, transmitting an Ethernet pause frame to at least one of the plurality of components the at least one component being identified as a source of a packet that caused the packet congestion; transmitting a backward congestion notification (BCN) packet to the at least one component, the BCN packet including data payload of the packet that caused the packet congestion; expediting the BCN packet transmission to the source of the packet that caused the packet congestion as a highest priority; identifying an offending stream responsive to at least a portion of the data payload; and throttling an offending packet stream originating from the at least one component responsive to the at least a portion of the data payload and relative to a non-offending packet stream originating from the at least one component in order to lower traffic load of the offending packet stream relative to the non-offending packet stream, the packet that caused the packet congestion belonging to the offending packet stream, wherein the non-offending packet is not throttled responsive to the BCN packet.