1. A switching device comprising: one or more physical layer interfaces for receiving one or more frames from a communication network; a plurality of data link layer processors being coupled to operate in parallel, wherein each data link layer processor comprises: one or more media access controllers (MACs), wherein each MAC is operatively coupled to a physical layer interface, each of said one or more MACs includes a MAC preprocessor and a MAC postprocessor, said MAC preprocessor including a traffic policer, said traffic policer adapted to execute an ingress traffic policy and frame discard, said traffic policer utilizing a three color marker algorithm to identify frames for discard, wherein the MAC postprocessor includes a traffic shaper adapted to perform bandwidth-based flow control for the egress traffic received by at least one of said MACs, wherein the traffic shaper regulates output bandwidth of the MAC postprocessor using a token bucket algorithm in conjunction with one or more buckets each associated with a respective one of a plurality of flow classes, and wherein tokens allotted to each bucket and tracked using a first counter represent a capacity for each one of said flow classes; and a statistics acquisition module, operatively coupled to the one or more MACs, for compiling statistics on each of the plurality of MACs; and a network processor, operatively coupled to the plurality of data link layer processors, for routing the one or more frames received from the plurality of data link layer processors.