Patent ID: 8307139

Claim:
A communication system comprising: a resource shared among a plurality of requestors such that, at any given time, only one of the plurality of requestors has access to the resource; and an arbiter configured to receive a request from each of the plurality of requestors to access the resource, wherein each request has a priority level associated with the request, age each request at a different rate relative to that associated with another request, wherein the different rate for each request is based on a comparison between i) an incrementing counter value, wherein the counter value is reset each time the priority level is increased, and the counter value corresponds to a time since the priority level was increased, and ii) a respective predetermined value, and wherein each respective predetermined value is different relative to another respective predetermined value, and grant each requestor access to the resource based on i) the priority level and/or ii) the age of the request corresponding to the requestor.