Fair arbitration between multiple sources targeting a destination

Abstract

A hardware module comprises at least a first ingress buffer and a second ingress buffer, where the second ingress buffer holds data packets from a plurality of source components. To ensure fairness between one or more sources providing data to the first ingress buffer and the plurality of sources providing data to the second ingress buffer, processing circuitry examines source identifiers in packets held in the second ingress buffer and selects between the buffers so as to arbitrate between the sources. In some embodiments, the examination of the source identifiers provides statistics for a weighted round robin between the ingress buffers. In other embodiments, the source identifier of whichever packet is currently at the head of the second ingress buffer is used to perform a simple round robin between the sources.