Patent ID: 7570654
Filing Date: 2009-08-04
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A switching device comprising a plurality of ingress ports to receive packets from external sources; a plurality of egress ports to transmit the packets to external destinations; a segmentation unit to store the packets received by the plurality of ingress ports as segments, wherein the packets having a length greater than a maximum segment length are divided into multiple segments; a plurality of queues to store the segments waiting to be transmitted from the plurality of ingress ports to the plurality of egress ports, wherein the segments are stored in a particular queue based at least in part on ingress port and egress port for an associated packet; a framer to aggregate a plurality of segments from one or more queues associated with a particular ingress port and a particular egress port to form a frame, wherein the frame has a maximum frame length, wherein the segments are retrieved from the one or more queues, and wherein the frame may contain segments associated with different packets; a request generator to generate requests for permission to transmit frames from the queues, wherein a request indicates a cumulative amount of data contained in a respective queue and wherein the cumulative amount of data is defined in terms of equivalent frames; a switching matrix to provide selective connectivity between the plurality of ingress ports and the plurality of egress ports; and a scheduler to receive the requests, generate grants based thereon, and configure the switching matrix, wherein said scheduler operates on a pipeline schedule and modifies the requests received to update the cumulative amount of data indicated as being contained in the queues to subtract the equivalent frames associated with grants generated in current period or previous period that are not reflected in the queues yet.