Patent attributes
A method and apparatus are provided for scheduling a heterogeneous communication flow. A heterogeneous flow is a flow comprising packets with varying classes or levels of service, which may correspond to different priorities, qualities of service or other service characteristics. When a packet is ready for scheduling, it is queued in order in a flow queue that corresponds to the communication flow. The flow queue then migrates among class queues that correspond to the class or level of service of the packet at the head of the flow queue. Thus, after the head packet is scheduled, the flow queue may be dequeued from its current class queue and requeued at the tail of another class queue. If the subsequent packet has the same classification, it may be requeued at the tail of the class queue or may remain in place for another servicing round.
