Patent ID: 8031721

Claim:
A method of processing packets at a communications node, comprising: providing a number of priority groups of packet queues containing packets to be transmitted from the node, wherein a first of the priority groups contains packets at a higher priority level than packets in a second of the priority groups; configuring one or more packet queues with two associated flow traffic descriptors (FTDs) representing a first traffic rate and a second traffic rate for each associated queue; providing each FTD to one of a plurality of transmission scheduling queues, each transmission scheduling queue having a transmission priority based on one or more priority rules; when a specific FTD becomes eligible for packet transmission during a defined time slot, retrieving one or more packets associated with the specified FTD from a packet queue associated with the specific FTD and marking the one or more packets to indicate a profile state based on the traffic rate of the specific FTD; transmitting during the defined time slot, the one or more marked packets associated with the specified FTD; and providing each packet in the one or more packet queues with a default profile state; wherein the default profile state is selected to be consistent with an available bandwidth of the respective packet queue.