Emulating output queued behavior in a virtual output queue switch

A system and method for routing network packets. A switch fabric connects a plurality of forwarding units, including an egress forwarding unit and two or more ingress forwarding units, each ingress forwarding unit forwarding network packets to the egress forwarding unit via the switch fabric. The egress forwarding unit includes a scheduler and an output queue. Each ingress forwarding unit includes a Virtual Output Queue (VOQ) connected to the output queue and a VOQ manager. The scheduler receives time of arrival information for packet groups stored in the VOQs, determines, based on the time of arrival information for each packet group, a device resident time for each packet group, and discards the packet groups when the determined device resident time for the packet group is greater than a maximum resident time.