Patent ID: 8218443

Claim:
A method of operating a receiving terminal for controlling bandwidth share of a data flow in a network, said method comprising: i) receiving a plurality of data packets forming part of a data flow sent by a sending terminal, wherein at least two of the plurality of data packets are ‘marked with a first flag indicating congestion experienced at an intermediate node in the network; ii) calculating the average rate at which the at least two data packets that are marked with a first flag are received; iii) responding to each of the received plurality of data packets by transmitting a corresponding one of a plurality of acknowledgement packets to the sending terminal; and iv) marking a plurality of the acknowledgement packets with a second flag, which when received by the sending terminal causes a reduction in the transmission rate of the data packets in the data flow, and wherein the rate at which the acknowledgement packets are marked with a second flag is a function of the average rate at which the received plurality data packets are marked with a first flag.