Patent ID: 7639619

Claim:
A method for quality-of-service (QoS) setup in a network segment of a network having multiple network segments that do not share a common physical medium, the network including a plurality of network devices including a source device for transmitting a data traffic stream, a sink device connected to said network segment for receiving the traffic stream from the source device, and an intermediate device connected to said network segment and through which the traffic stream passes from the source device to the sink device, and wherein one of said plurality of network devices other than the intermediate device contains a QoS parameter holder (QPH), the method comprising: signaling the source device and the sink device from the QPH with QoS parameters to thereby configure the source device and sink device with the QoS parameters; transmitting a traffic stream from the source device through the intermediate device to the sink device; detecting at the intermediate device a traffic stream identifier from the traffic stream; querying the QPH for QoS parameters associated with the detected traffic stream identifier; sending QoS parameters from the QPH; receiving at the intermediate device QoS parameters from the QPH; and configuring said network segment with the QoS parameters received at the intermediate device.