Patent ID: 6950396

Claim:
A method of scheduling traffic from a plurality of queues onto a link, at least one of the queues having an agreed bandwidth requirement and at least one of the queues having no agreed bandwidth requirement, the method comprising the steps of: a) assigning a weight to each queue having an agreed bandwidth requirement, the weight being determined in dependence on the ratio of the queue's required bandwidth to the available link bandwidth, a queue with a low weight being scheduled for transmission before a queue with a higher weight; b) grouping the queues having no agreed bandwidth requirement into a group, Q*, and assigning a weight to the group; and c) scheduling the queues for transmission on the link in dependence on their assigned weight and on a last transmission time for the respective queue, wherein if a scheduled queue has no traffic to transmit another queue is scheduled, the group Q* being scheduled after the other queues; wherein the weight W N , for a queue, Q N , is calculated as: W N = R L R N × STEP where a value, STEP, is defined as the lowest assignable weight, R L is the link bandwidth and R N is the queue's required bandwidth.