A traffic manager for integrated queuing and scheduling of unicast and multicast IP traffic

An efficient, programmable Traffic Manager (TM) architecture for supporting simultaneous scheduling of uni- and multi-cast traffic in a packet switch, is presented. By exploiting the use of new, programmable high-speed TMs, the analysis presented shows that by introducing ingress replication into line cards, we can augment a packet switch´s multicasting capabilities. A new, multicast-enabled TM that efficiently controls ingress replication in a flexible and non-complex manner is presented. Simulation results are provided that demonstrate the improvement.