Patent attributes
Bandwidth allocated between the traffic classes of a network path is dynamically reallocated when one or more traffic classes have insufficient available bandwidth to support a service request for the traffic classes, wherein the reallocation occurs without modifying the traffic class bandwidth allocations enforced by router mechanisms. A provisioning system maintains an available bandwidth indication for each traffic class, which indications are decremented as a service request is admitted to the path. If a requested traffic class has insufficient available bandwidth to support a request, one or more other traffic classes can loan bandwidth to the requested traffic class by decrementing the available bandwidth indicators for the one or more other traffic classes in the amount of the insufficiency, thereby indicating that less bandwidth is available in these classes for future requests. The provisioning system also maintains an indication of the amount of bandwidth each traffic class loans to the other traffic classes.
