Patent ID: 7260102

Claim:
A system for conveying an arbitrary mixture of high and low latency traffic streams across a common switch fabric, the system comprising: at least two diverse paths mapped though the switch fabric from a common input interface to a common output interface, each path being optimized to satisfy respective different traffic latency requirements; a latency classifier adapted to route each one of the traffic streams received at the input interface to one of the at least two diverse paths based upon a latency requirement of each traffic stream most closely matching the respective traffic latency of each of the at least two diverse paths; at least two prioritization classifiers, each one of the prioritization classifiers associated with one of the at least two diverse paths, each prioritization classifier independently prioritizes traffic being conveyed through the respective path, and wherein each one of the traffic streams received at the common input interface is routed to one of the at least two diverse paths by the latency classifier and each of the at least two diverse paths are processed independently by the respective prioritization classifiers before transport through the switch fabric to the common output interface.