Patent ID: 7006438

Claim:
A network switch comprising: an asynchronous mesh; N ingress interfaces coupled to the asynchronous mesh, the N ingress interfaces having an ingress scheduler to receive data from external sources and to selectively schedule and asynchronously transmit the data across the asynchronous mesh according to a first schedule; and N egress interfaces coupled to the asynchronous mesh, the N egress interfaces having an egress scheduler to receive data from the asynchronous mesh and to schedule and transmit the data to external destinations according to a second schedule different than the first schedule, wherein the ingress scheduler performs scheduling and transmitting data across the asynchronous mesh independent of the egress scheduler performing scheduling and transmitting data to the external destinations, wherein each of the N ingress interfaces includes N ingress buffers to temporarily store the data received from the external sources before being transmitted across the asynchronous mesh, each of the N ingress buffers corresponding to each of the N egress interfaces respectively, wherein each of the N egress interfaces includes N egress buffers separated from the N ingress buffers to temporarily store the data received from each of the N ingress interfaces across the asynchronous mesh before being transmitted to the external destinations, each of the N egress buffers corresponding to each of the N ingress interfaces respectively, wherein the ingress scheduler retrieves the data from each of the ingress buffers and transmits the retrieved data to a corresponding egress buffer of each of the egress interfaces according to the first schedule, and wherein the egress scheduler retrieves the data from each of the egress buffers and transmits the retrieved data to the external destinations according to the second schedule independent of the first schedule.