Patent ID: 7907518

Claim:
A communication traffic control system comprising: a filter system comprising a number N of filtering modules, wherein N is greater than 1, each filtering module being configured to receive communication traffic from a first communication traffic management device, to filter its respective received communication traffic using cut-through discard filtering, and to provide a respective filtered communication traffic stream at a respective output, the output of each filtering module to be operatively coupled to a second communication traffic management device, the first communication traffic management device having a first throughput capacity and a number M of queues to store communication traffic and to provide isolation between M communication traffic streams, wherein M is less than N, the second communication traffic management device having a second throughput capacity and a number P of queues to store the filtered communication traffic streams received from the filter system and to provide isolation between P communication traffic streams, wherein P is greater than M, the first throughput capacity of the first communication traffic management device being higher than the second throughput capacity of the second communication traffic management device; and a controller operatively coupled to the filtering modules and configured to control each filtering module to filter out communication traffic from its respective received communication traffic responsive to determining that the respective filtered communication traffic stream is congested at the second communication traffic management device, wherein at least one of the controller and the filter system is implemented using hardware.