Method and system for ingress multicast load balancing

摘要

A system, method and apparatus for efficient bandwidth management of traffic across a plurality of channels using one or more epoch-based load balancing functions to asynchronously rebalance traffic allocations among the channels.

主权项

1. Apparatus, comprising:
a plurality of ingress ports for receiving respective ingress packet flows, each ingress packet flow comprising one or more data streams; a plurality of communication channels, for routing received data streams toward respective egress ports, each of said communication channels having a respective bandwidth capacity; and a bandwidth management module, for configuring policers in conformance with a buffer structure defined by buffers of ingress ports, egress ports and switch fabric supporting the plurality of communication channels, and for redistributing data streams according to load balancing criteria upon the expiration of each of a sequence of epoch intervals, said epoch intervals having a duration selected in response to bandwidth characteristics of received data streams.