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Abstract

A method and apparatus for providing a minimum per-connection bandwidth guarantee and the ability to employ shared bandwidth thereabove in an environment having both virtual-connection and link-level flow control. A buffer pool downstream of a transmitter and disposed in a receiver is divided among a first portion dedicated for allocated bandwidth cell traffic and a second portion for dynamic bandwidth cell traffic. Link flow control enables receiver cell buffer sharing while maintaining the per-connection bandwidth guarantee. No cell-loss due to buffer overflows at the receiver is also guaranteed, resulting in high link-utilization in a frame traffic environment, as well as low delay in the absence of cell retransmission. A higher and thus more efficient utilization of receiver cell buffers is achieved.

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