Patent 7110360 was granted and assigned to Juniper Networks on September, 2006 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A fabric request controller implements flow control for data cells to a network or switch fabric. The fabric request controller issues request messages to the fabric switch and receives back corresponding grant messages. The fabric request controller includes a credit counter for metering the number of allowable outstanding requests. A fake request vector component periodically issues fake requests to compensate for information loss on the switch fabric.