A HIGH-SPEED, PROGRAMMABLE PACKET SCHEDULER AND BUFFER MANAGER

摘要

A method and apparatus for managing the buffering and for scheduling the transfer of packets of data arriving on one or a plurality of input ports and destined for one or a plurality of output ports of a packet switch or router or a subsystem thereof is disclosed. Each arriving packet is assigned an index that specifies both a unique destination output port for the packet and membership in a subclass, such as a priority class, a connection or flow. For each arriving packet, a minipacket is created that contains the index of the packet, a unique identifier such as a storage location. Each index is assigned a unique queue in which minipackets with the given index are placed in order of arrival. Packets are transmitted from storage to output ports according to the sequence of minipackets that exit the scheduler system.