Patent ID: 7215678

Claim:
A method for bandwidth scheduling in a switch comprising a switching fabric, and a bandwidth scheduler located before any queue of said switch, the method comprising the steps of: receiving a stream of data from the switching fabric; extracting flow identity information from the stream; updating counters corresponding to the stream; and subjecting the stream to a decision making algorithm in the bandwidth scheduler based on the extracted flow identity information and the undated counters for that particular stream resulting in that the stream is accepted or rejected before said stream enters any queue of said switch, wherein the flow identity information includes port, identified by port number, and traffic class, and wherein a limit (BWP max ) is set on the maximum accepted bandwidth per port and wherein a virtual queue is associated with each port by means of a counter VQLP (virtual queue length of port) and the counter VQLP is increased with the packet length for each accepted packet and updated by subtracting the configuration parameter BWP max (maximum accepted bandwidth per port) each time unit.