ON-SWITCH POLICY RULE CACHING FOR DATA COMMUNICATION SWITCH

摘要

On-switch rule caching for facilitating quality of service (QoS) provisioning. Policy rules downloaded from a directory server (330) are cached on a switch (340) for a determinate duration to enable application in provisioning QoS for multiple flows. Active policy rules are aged-out in response to expiration of a time-to-live value associated with a policy rule. If the time-to-live has expired, a "stale" policy rule is removed from a rule cache (386), and a "fresh" policy rule is downloaded from the directory server (330). A time-to-live value may be increased in response to each application of a policy rule. On-switch rule caching may be applied in conjunction with out-of-band QoS provisioning, i.e. QoS provisioning conducted in connection with a path set-up protocol such as Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) (385), or in-band QoS provisioning, i.e. QoS provisioning conducted in connection with the data packet forwarding process.