Claims Analysis
Total Claims: 8
Claim 1
Independent Claim
82 words
Switching device for routing information through a communication network with a back-holding congestion control mechanism, comprising a selective congestion notification device (8, 10, 12) for transmitting a congestion notification (36) to enable throttling of a selected virtual connection, said congestion notification (36) containing routing information and deferment information, said deferment information including a predetermined duration of a deferment interval for which traffic on said selected virtual connection must go on hold or the transmission rate of the selected virtual connection is reduced.
Claim 2
Dependent Claim
82 words
Switching device for routing information through a communication network with a back-holding congestion control mechanism, comprising a selective congestion notification device (8, 10, 12) for transmitting a congestion notification (36) to enable throttling of a selected virtual connection, said congestion notification (36) containing routing information and deferment information, said deferment information including a predetermined duration of a deferment interval for which traffic on said selected virtual connection must go on hold or the transmission rate of the selected virtual connection is reduced.
Claim 3
Dependent Claim
37 words
Switching device according to claim 1, wherein a virtual connection is selected by counting the number of cells incoming from each virtual connection and selecting the virtual connection for throttling whose cell count exceeds a given threshold.
Claim 4
Dependent Claim
37 words
Switching device according to claim 1, wherein said deferment message includes a point in time at which transmission may be resumed at normal speed or a quantity of information units which must arrive before transmission is restarted.
Claim 5
Dependent Claim
59 words
Switching device according to claim 1, comprising at least an input-port module (8, 10, 12), a switching fabric (13, 14, 15) and an output-port module (7, 9, 11), wherein said input-port module (8, 10, 12) comprises a selective throttling device (18-22, 34, 35, 40, 41) for temporarily stopping transmission on the selected virtual connection or temporarily reducing transmission rate.
Claim 6
Dependent Claim
24 words
Switching device according to claim 4, wherein the throttling device (18-22, 34, 35, 40, 41) is designed to react to a congestion notification (36).
Claim 7
Dependent Claim
39 words
Switching device according to claim 4 or 5, further comprising a local congestion control mechanism, wherein a congested output-port module (7) notifies the input-port modules (8, 10, 12) to selectively hold back traffic which otherwise would cause further congestion.
Claim 8
Dependent Claim
29 words
Switching device according to claim 6, wherein the throttling device comprises dedicated devices for label bookkeeping (18-22), label searching (19), label filtering (34, 35), timestamping (35), and/or linked-list queueing.