Abstract: A improved connection shaping technique is disclosed, whereby at least one high-priority “preemptive” service flow is initiated at a customer entity in order to limit or restrict the effective usable bandwidth on a particular line or connection. According to at least one embodiment, a preempt data parcel corresponds to a data parcel which includes non-meaningful data. When the preempt cells are received at the ingress port of the communication line, the preempt cells may be identified as non-meaningful data parcels, and may be discarded in accordance with conventional protocols.

Abstract: A technique is described for providing service to multiple ports sharing common scheduling resources. According to one implementation, the scheduling technique of the present invention may be used to dynamically balance the frequency of needs of different client flows to the resource availability of the scheduling process for client flows which have relative time sensitive needs of service. Moreover, according to a specific implementations, the scheduling technique of the present invention may be used to provide efficient allocation of switching and/or scheduling resources across multiple ports even in the presence of dynamic port bandwidth changes.

Abstract: An architecture and techniques of the present invention combine multiple queues into a single multientity queue that functions in conjunction with a free queue embodied within the multientity queue. This multientity queue enables a device to significantly decrease overhead of memory clock cycles as data parcels are passed from process to process. The architecture implements a single queue with new pointers in addition to the “old” and “new” pointers associated with conventional queues. These new pointers represent processes or entities and can be referred to as first entity pointer, second entity pointer, third entity pointer and so on.