A method and technique of managing network traffic using a digital signal processing integrated circuit (DSP). The DSP performs one or more of the following functions on the incoming network traffic: classification, policing, congestion control, segmentation and reassembly, queuing, scheduling, shaping and label switching. The DSP may have one or a plurality of processing cores. In one embodiment of the invention, each processing core of the DSP is dedicated to specific traffic management layer. The DSP, used in management of network traffic, provides quality of service (QoS) or class of service (CoS) control.