Traffic Management in a Network Switching System with Remote Physical Ports

A switching system includes a port extender device coupled to a central switching device. Packets processed by the central switching device are forwarded to the port extender device and enqueued in ones of a plurality of egress queues in the port extender device for transmission of the packets via the front ports of the port extender device. Respective egress queues in the port extender device have a queue depth that is less than a queue depth of corresponding respective egress queues in the central switching device. A flow control message indicative of congestion in a particular egress queue of the port extender device is generated and transmitted to the central switch device to control transmission of packets from the central switching device to the particular egress queue of the port extender device.