Patent attributes
Packets in a data communications network are encapsulated by an encapsulation module on a sending computer and decapsulated on the receiver computer, the transmission of data packets being controlled by credit sent by the receiving computer to avoid causing congestion. The encapsulation module varies fields in the packets that are used by switches to determine the path to the destination, so as to distribute the load of a transfer across a plurality of paths to the receiving computer. The sending and receiving computers use per path packet delivery, loss, latency and packet trimming information to detect abnormal network behavior and submit alerts and summary statistics to a monitoring station. The monitoring station uses this information to detect network bottlenecks and other faults and to localize them to specific switches or links.
