The present invention provides hierarchical structures of queues and
schedulers for switches and routers with, preferably fully-connected,
mesh fabrics, for efficiently and properly handling the quality or
service requirements of multiple network services, such as ATM and IP, in
switch or router. The switches of this invention provide, for example,
fair allocation of bandwidths to different network services, to different
QoS classes within network services, and to different resources within
the switch by use of, preferably, weighted, fair scheduling methods. The
switches and routers of this invention are particularly directed to
multi-protocol, high-throughput communication application, but may have
wide applicability in systems generally where data packets are switched
or routed.