A traffic shaper for absorbing a
cell delay variation of
cell flow in each of virtual connections in an ATM (asynchronous transmission mode) network is realized. The traffic shaper comprises a
cell identification part, a
cell memory, a sending-out time determination part and a
cell memory control part. The cell identification part is provided for identifying a virtual connection allocated to an input cell, the
cell memory is provided for storing input cells into respective virtual queues, each
queue is corresponding to the virtual connection, in accordance with the identified virtual connection of each input cell, the sending-out time determination part is provided for determining a sending-out time for each cell stored in the cell memory on the virtual connection basis, and the cell
memory control part is provided for performing a cell output from each
virtual queue in accordance with the sending-out time determined for each cell, and performing an output competition control by selecting a cell to be output among cells having the same sending-out time in different virtual queues in accordance with a predetermined output priority assigned to each virtual connection.