Patent ID: 7843843

Claim:
An apparatus facilitating the management of network traffic transmitted over a differentiated services network supporting one or more classes of service, comprising a packet processor operative to detect data flows in network traffic traversing a communications path, the data flows each comprising at least one packet; a traffic classification engine operative to identify one or more network applications in data flows traversing the apparatus, a network performance monitoring module operative to monitor the performance of the differentiated services network relative to the one or more classes of service supported by the differentiated services network; and, a class of service (CoS) selector operative to compute, for at least one of the network applications, fitness values for the one or more classes of service based on the respective minimum acceptable performance parameters associated with corresponding network applications and the monitored performance of the one or more classes of service supported by the differentiated services network, select a class of service from the one or more classes of service for a given data flow based on the identified network application, and a comparison between the fitness values for each of the classes of service corresponding to the identified network application, and wherein the apparatus is operative to mark the packets of the data flows based on the identified network applications and the selected classes of service, and transmit the packets over the differentiated services network.