Patent ID: 7515591

Claim:
An arrangement for scheduling transport of information cells, received from a data communication network by respective data storage buffers of a single switch fabric of a primary channel bank as a single switching element of a data communication system, from said data storage buffers to associated data ports of said primary channel bank and one or more second channel banks as part of the single switching element of said data communication system, said arrangement comprising: a plurality of per port, data transport schedulers installed in said primary channel bank and being coupled with respective ones of said data storage buffers, each per port, data transport scheduler of said primary channel bank being operative to controllably read out information cells from its associated data storage buffer, for transport over a downstream communication link to a respective destination data port, at the data rate of said destination data port; and wherein a respective per port, data transport scheduler includes an accumulator, contents of which are sequentially modified, at a scheduler clock frequency, by a quantity M defined by a prescribed relationship between the size of an information cell, the data rate of the port with which said scheduler is associated, and said scheduler clock.