Patent ID: 7843928

Claim:
An egress traffic management system for a data communication system, comprising: a packet processor operable to receive a data packet from a switch fabric and to affix an egress queue header to the data packet; a main egress queue module having a set of internal queues for data packets and being operable to receive the data packet from the packet processor and to forward the data packet to one of the internal queues identifier based on the contents of the egress queue header; and an interface module operable to: receive the data packet from the main egress queue module, forward the data packet to a main input/output module when the egress queue header does not contain at least a first secondary queue identifier, and forward the data packet to one of a plurality of distributed queue modules in accordance with the first secondary queue identifier when the egress queue header contains at least the first secondary queue identifier, wherein the one of the distributed queue modules further: forwards the data packet to a second main input/output module when the egress queue header contains a first secondary queue identifier and does not contain a second secondary queue identifier; and forwards the data packet to a one of a second plurality of distributed queue modules in accordance with the second secondary queue identifier when the egress queue header contains at least the first and second secondary queue identifiers, wherein the second plurality of distributed queue modules are subtended from the one of the plurality of distributed queue modules.