Patent ID: 7558200

Claim:
A process for managing router congestion in a distributed communications system, comprising: receiving data packets from senders; tracking data packet transmission rates of the senders; implementing an accented congestion management protocol that expects each of the senders to decrease its respective data transmission rate if congestion occurs; detecting congestion or potential congestion; during the congestion or potential congestion, determining that one or more of the senders deviate from the accepted congestion management protocol by comparing, for each sender, a present data packet transmission rate to a prior tracked data transmission rate for the sender to determine whether the sender maintained or increased its rate of data packet transmission in violation of the accented congestion management protocol; rank ordering the one or more of the senders according to egregiousness of their deviation from the accented congestion management protocol to generate a rank ordered list of one or more worst offenders; identifying which of the received data packets are from the one or more worst offenders of the rank ordered list; marking the identified data packets for dropping; queuing in a queue, according to received order, the received data packets, including the identified data packets marked for dropping; and transmitting the received data packets from a head of the queue except for at least some of those data packets marked for dropping which were received from a most egregious one of the one or more worst offenders according to the rank ordered list wherein a decision for not transmitting occurs based on the marking as each of the marked, identified data packets reaches the head of the queue.