Arbitration scheme for equitable distribution of bandwidth for agents with different bandwidth requirements

摘要

A device for arbitrating access to a resource by a plurality of agents includes logic configured to associate requesting ones of the agents with access tokens. The number of the access tokens assigned to each requesting agent is proportional to its bandwidth or speed in comparison with the other requesting agents. A is selector configured to sequence through the access tokens and select respective ones of the requesting agents associated with the access tokens. The logic may dynamically reconfigure token allocation and distribution to only those agents having a pending service request or may skip tokens allocated to agents not having a pending request. The distribution of tokens is preferably uniform over the total bandwidth space of the agents or requesting agents. In one implementation tokens are in the form of binary numbers.