Abstract: The present invention relates to a switching unit with a low-latency flow control. Queuing parameters of ingress queues, wherein the incoming traffic is backlogged, are measured to detect a short term traffic increase. An additional bandwidth is then negotiated to accommodate this unexpected additional amount of traffic, provided that the corresponding input and output termination modules still dispose of available bandwidth, and disregarding temporarily fairness. This additional bandwidth allows this unexpected additional amount of traffic to be drained from the ingress queue as soon as possible, without waiting for the next system bandwidth fair re-distribution, thereby improving the traffic latency through the switching unit.