A Novel Feedback Mechanism for Load Balanced Two-Stage Switches

— A novel feedback mechanism is proposed in this paper to enhance the performance of load-balanced two-stage switches. The key idea is to properly select and coordinate the two sequences of N deterministic configurations used by the two stages of switch fabrics, thereby forming a joint sequence with both staggered symmetry property and in-order packet delivery property. With a single-packet-buffer-per-middle-stage VOQ, a joint sequence with both properties is first constructed. Then based on it, an efficient feedback mechanism is designed to allow the right piece of middle-stage port occupancy information to be delivered to the right input port at the right time. In each time slot, an input selects a packet for sending based on its port-based scheduling algorithm. To this end, three simple port-based scheduling algorithms, RR, LQF and EDF, are also proposed. Simulation results show that with our proposed feedback mechanism, the three scheduling algorithms gives an unbeatable delay-th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICC
• Authors: Kwan L. Yeung, Bing Hu, N. H. Liu
• Keywords: Communications, Feedback Mechanism, ICC 2007, Port-based Scheduling Algorithms, Scheduling Algorithms