Patent ID: 7295562

Claim:
A system for identifying priority level information for a data frame received by a network device, comprising: a plurality of input ports configured to receive a plurality of data frames, each of the received data frames specifying at least one of a plurality of classes of service; a memory configured to store a plurality of priority levels, one for each of the plurality of classes of service, wherein the memory includes a plurality of registers or a lookup table; an action generator configured to generate an action tag for each of the received data frames, wherein the action generator includes: an action memory configured to store a plurality of entries, wherein each of the entries includes: a differentiated services code point (DSCP)/priority field configured to store one of DSCP data and priority data relating to one of the classes of service, a deny field configured to store data indicating whether to drop a corresponding one of the received data frames, a forward-to-management field configured to store data indicating whether to forward the corresponding data frame to a management device, a priority field configured to store data indicating whether the DSCP/priority field stores valid priority data, and a DSCP field configured to store data indicating whether the DSCP/priority field stores valid DSCP data, a decoder configured to identify one of the entries in the action memory in response to the received data frames, and a tag generator configured to generate the action tags based on the identified entries; and a port vector queue configured to use the action tag from the action generator for each of the received data frames to access the memory to retrieve one of the stored priority levels that corresponds to a class of service specified by each of the received data frames.