Port scheduler policies control the traffic behavior on a per-port basis. Associated with each egress port is a set of eight class of service (CoS) queues and a default port scheduler policy named ‟default”. This default policy makes the port behave in strict mode. The default policy cannot be modified. The user can attach another policy to the port to change its scheduling behavior. The scheduler provides the arbitration across the eight CoS queues and is configured in a variety of modes. A major aspect of the arbitration mechanism is the ability to provide minimum and maximum bandwidth guarantees. After the packets are mapped into a CoS queue, they are forwarded/conditioned using one of the schedulers (such as Strict Priority (SP), Round-Robin (RR), Weighted Round-Robin (WRR), Weighted Deficit Round-Robin (WDRR), (WRR+SP, WDRR+SP)). The traffic shaping aspect is tightly integrated with the scheduler.