Max-Min Fair Scheduling in Input-Queued Switches

Fairness in traffic management can improve the isolation between traffic streams, offer a more predictable performance, eliminate transient bottlenecks, mitigate the effect of certain kinds of denialof-service attacks, and serve as a critical component of a quality-of-service strategy to achieve certain guaranteed services such as delay bounds and minimum bandwidths. In this paper, we choose a popular notion of fairness called max-min fairness and provide a rigorous definition in the context of input-queued switches. We show that being fair at the output ports alone, or at the input ports alone, or even at both input and output ports, does not actually achieve overall max-min fair allocation of bandwidth in a switch. Instead, we propose a new algorithm that can be readily implemented in a distributed fashion at the input and output ports to determine the exact maxmin fair rate allocations for the flows through the switch. In addition to proving the correctness of the algorithm, we pro...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TPDS
• Authors: Madhusudan Hosaagrahara, Harish Sethu
• Keywords: Algorithms, Input-queued Switches, Output Ports, TPDS 2008