Patent ID: 7830797

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a first ingress circuit to receive packets of data; an egress circuit to transmit the packets; a second ingress circuit to receive one or more shaping indications each identifying a respective data flow comprising a plurality of the packets; a shaping controller to associate each data flow with a respective shaped queue in response to the respective shaping indication; a flow identification engine to identify the packets received by the first ingress circuit that belong to each of the data flows; a forwarding engine to transfer the packets belonging to each data flow from the first ingress circuit to the associated shaped queue, and to transfer the packets not belonging to any of the data flows from the ingress circuit to an unshaped queue; and a scheduler to dequeue the packets from the unshaped queue to the egress circuit, and to dequeue the packets from each shaped queue to the egress circuit only when no packets for the respective data flow remain in the unshaped queue.