Towards Simple, High-performance Schedulers for High-aggregate Bandwidth Switches

— High-aggregate bandwidth switches are those whose port count multiplied by the operating line rate is very high; for example, a 30 port switch operating at 40 Gbps or a 1000 port switch operating at 1 Gbps. Designing high-performance schedulers for such switches is a challenging problem for the following reasons: (i) High performance requires finding good matchings, (ii) good matchings take time to find, and (iii) in highaggregate bandwidth switches there is either too little time (due to high line rates) or there is too much work to do (due to a high port count). We exploit the following features of the switching problem to devise simple-to-implement, high-performance schedulers for high-aggregate bandwidth switches: (a) the state of the switch (carried in the lengths of its queues) changes slowly with time, implying that heavy matchings will likely stay heavy over a period of time, (b) observing arriving packets will convey useful information about the state of the switch. The ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Paolo Giaccone, Balaji Prabhakar, Devavrat Shah
• Keywords: Bandwidth Switches, Communications, INFOCOM 2002, Port Count, Port Switch