also desirable feedback is provided from the buffers 36 to the traffic manager 35 to indicate the current fill state of the buffers and to cause the discarding of further packets should their designated queue within the buffer become full packets output from the ingress buffer 36 are passed to the switching fabric 23 for routing to the appropriate egress port 22 the packets arriving at the egress port are fed via egress traffic manager 41 and egress buffer 42 to an egress scheduler 43 for output transmission to the line when implementing virtual routers it is desirable to provide hard partitions between the bandwidth allocated to each control architecture on each port while allowing flexibility for the normal bandwidth management mechanisms to operate within each partition the enhanced divider behaviour may also provide benefits when partitioning resources devoted to elastic traffic in an atm switch the divider enhancement that supports partitioning of elastic flows is the virtual port at the egress from the router or switch this requires that the divider support an abstraction of the egress scheduler on each physical port such that the port bandwidth may be divided typically on a rate basis between each partition allocated resource on that port prior to execution of the scheduling process within that partition for a conventional common memory router or switch fabric the virtual egress port abstraction may be sufficient for the bandwidth partitioning in conjunction with.