US Patent 10097478 Controlling fair bandwidth allocation efficiently

Micro-schedulers control bandwidth allocation for clients, each client subscribing to a respective predefined portion of bandwidth of an outgoing communication link. A macro-scheduler controls the micro-schedulers, by allocating the respective subscribed portion of bandwidth associated with each respective client that is active, by a predefined first deadline, with residual bandwidth that is unused by the respective clients being shared proportionately among respective active clients by a predefined second deadline, while minimizing coordination among micro-schedulers by the macro-scheduler periodically adjusting respective bandwidth allocations to each micro-scheduler.