US Patent 7046685 Scheduling control system and switch

A scheduling system is capable of causing no deterioration of characteristics even under equal and unequal loads, eliminating the necessity for high-speed repetitive scheduling and complicated arithmetic processes, simplifying its architecture and having its processing speed which does not depend upon a device capability. For attaining this system, an inter-highway pointer is updated to an adjacent line (rightward) when the scheduling for all the lines are finished. If the inter-highway pointer is updated N-times in the same direction (clockwise), the same pointer is updated to an adjacent line in a reverse direction (counterclockwise) in next N-processes of scheduling.