Alternate priority queuing. Dequeuing method that has a special queue, similar to strict-priority queuing (SPQ), which is visited only 50 percent of the time. The packets in the special queue still have a predictable latency, although the upper limit of the delay is higher than that with SPQ. Since the other configured queues share the remaining 50 percent of the service time, queue starvation is usually avoided. See also SPQ.