Patent ID: 7069557

Claim:
A method of operating a network processor, the method comprising: (a) maintaining a schedule indicative of respective times at which a plurality of virtual channels are to be serviced; (b) reading an entry from the schedule, the entry corresponding to a current transmit cycle and including a pointer to a channel descriptor for a virtual channel to be serviced in the current transmit cycle; (c) transmitting a data cell for the virtual channel to be serviced in the current transmit cycle; (d) adding to the schedule an entry which points to a channel descriptor that is pointed to by the channel descriptor for the virtual channel serviced in the current transmit cycle; and (e) writing to the channel descriptor pointed to by the channel descriptor for the virtual channel serviced in the current transmit cycle a time stamp indicative of a scheduled time for servicing a virtual channel which corresponds to the channel descriptor pointed to by the channel descriptor for the virtual channel serviced in the current transmit cycle.