An adaptive weighted round robin scheduling apparatus and method schedules variable-length frame transmissions from a plurality of output queues having different transmission priorities by first allocating, for each queue, a number of bandwidth segments for a bandwidth cycle and a number of transmission opportunities for a round robin cycle, and then processing the queues consecutively in a round-robin fashion, beginning with a highest priority queue, until none of the queues has any bandwidth remaining. More specifically, during each iteration of a round robin cycle, a queue is permitted to transmit a frame if the queue has at least one remaining transmission opportunity, the queue has a frame ready for transmission, and the queue has at least one remaining bandwidth segment, and furthermore the number of transmission opportunities for the queue is decremented by at least one. Upon transmitting a frame, the number of bandwidth segments for the queue is decreased by the number of bandwidth segments in the frame. If a queue has no frame ready for transmission, then the queue may be either penalized, in which case the number of bandwidth segments for the queue is reduced, or forced to forfeit its bandwidth segments, in which case any remaining bandwidth segments are reallocated to other queues and the number of bandwidth segments and the number of transmission opportunities for the queue are set to zero.