Patent ID: 7512148

Claim:
In a weighted round-robin arbitrator comprising: a plurality of data queues; the improvement comprising: an arbitration table comprising a plurality of entries, each entry representing a time slot for the transmission of one data packet from a selected one of the plurality of data queues; an arbitration logic circuit, for each of the plurality of entries in the arbitration table, comprising: a first multiplexer receiving an output from a first table entry and an output from a second table entry in the arbitration table; a second multiplexer receiving empty flags from each of the data queues, the flags indicating that there is no data to be sent from that queue, an output of the second multiplexer being coupled to a control input of the first multiplexer whereby the first table entry value is output from the first multiplexer if the corresponding queue has data to be sent out and the second table entry value is sent out from the first multiplexer if the queue corresponding to that table entry has data to be sent out and the queue corresponding to the first entry has no data to be sent out.