Patent ID: 7212528

Claim:
A method of transmitting variable length packets associated with a destination address through a network element having a plurality of ingress cards, a plurality of egress cards and a cell-based switch fabric between said ingress cards and said egress cards, the method comprising: a) segmenting at said ingress cards each incoming packet into a group of fixed length cells containing routing information; b) arranging said groups of fixed length cells into at least one group of corresponding traffic flows; c) transmitting to the switch fabric for forwarding toward a particular egress card the cells of a particular group of traffic flows on a cell-by-cell basis in an ordered sequence such that each group of cells from said particular group of traffic flows is transmitted as a contiguous group of cells without being interleaved with other cells; d) transmitting to the switch fabric for forwarding toward said particular egress card the cells of another traffic flow or group of traffic flows on a cell-by-cell basis in a packet ordered sequence such that each group of cells from said another group of traffic flows is transmitted as a contiguous group of cells without being interleaved with other cells; e) said cells being subject to becoming interleaved during transmission toward said egress card after entering the switch fabric; f) at said particular egress card assigning arriving cells on a cell-by-cell basis to one of a plurality of reassembly queues associated with the respective groups of traffic flows or traffic flows so as to form in each reassembly queue a non-interleaved ordered sequence of groups of contiguous cells corresponding to the segmented incoming packets from the group of traffic flows or traffic flow associated with that reassembly queue; g) reassembling the groups of contiguous cells in each reassembly queue into the corresponding incoming packets; and h) transmitting the reassembled packets in an egress traffic flow from the network element.