Patent ID: 7826354

Claim:
A method for scheduling transmission-link capacity between packet switched traffic flows in a telecommunications network element when packet transmission demand from the traffic flows exceeds transmission link capacity, comprising: utilizing at least one of a processor and a microcircuit apparatus in the network element to perform a scheduling process by: receiving digital information as constant or variable-size packets offered from the traffic flows for forwarding, and collecting the packets in a buffer memory, attaching one of at least two alternative priority values to each of the packets, attaching a weighting-factor value to each of the traffic flows, using a weighting-factor based scheduling method for calculating a sequence indicator for each of the packets that are offered for forwarding, selecting one packet from packets that are offered for forwarding, and forwarding the selected packet to an outgoing data transmission link for transmission via the telecommunication network, wherein once the transmission of the selected packed has terminated, a next packet to be forwarded is selected, and wherein the selection of the packet to be forwarded is performed in two stages, as follows: 1) a sub-group of packets is extracted from the packets offered for forwarding, the extracted sub-group containing the packets representing the highest priority value to be found from the packets offered for forwarding, and 2) the packet to be forwarded is selected from the extracted sub-group of packets on the basis of the sequence indicators related to the packets belonging to the extracted sub-group of packets.