The existing network devices are based on fully programmable network processors offering inter alia integrated traffic managers, packet processing and advanced flow-based bandwidth control. Their resources are sufficient to implement DiffServ and IntServ devices, in which schedulers on each output interface work with the same settings. However, the growing expectations to computer networks such as strict QoS requirement or content aware processing results in management of many simultaneous flows. In such approaches each output interface can be characterized with different service parameters, e.g. shaping or weighted queuing priorities. Nevertheless, the network processors have limitations in the number of possible settings of integrated schedulers. Therefore, their application to novel solutions for computer networks requires an efficient utilization of their available resources.

In this paper, based on the analysis of the limitations of some existing network processors, we formulate a resource allocation problem, which opens new perspectives to extend possibilities of the discussed processors to cover growing requirements of Future Internet.