Traffic management scheme

摘要

A method of managing data traffic carried over a broadband communications network by receiving a stream of data packets originating from a source address associated with a communications device, associating the communications-enabled device with a predetermined service identifier; and, controlling the transmission of said data packets over said broadband communications network in accordance with a traffic profile associated with said service identifier for a type of content of the data packets. In this way, voice traffic originating from a cellular communications device which has wireless broadband communications capabilities can be assigned a traffic profile which deters use of a wireless local area network (WLAN) for certain types of traffic, for example, real-time streamed traffic such as live or voice traffic. This traffic profile is imposed in one embodiment by increasing the variability of the delay experienced by such a data packet stream selectively over the variability of delay experienced by other types of data traffic generated by said device. As such data traffic is often bandwidth intensive, by deterring use of the local area network for such types of data traffic, more bandwidth is made available for other types of traffic. This is particularly useful where the wireless LAN access network is provided by a residential access point which offers roaming or guest access with limited bandwidth.