Report Number: CSL-TR-95-680
Institution: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
Title: Designing a Multicast Switch Scheduler
Author: Prabhakar, Balaji
Author: McKeown, Nick W.
Date: November 1995
Abstract: This paper presents the design of the scheduler for an M x N input-queued switch. It is assumed that each input maintains a single queue for arriving multicast cells and that only the cell at the head of line (HOL) can be observed and scheduled at one time. The scheduler is required to be work-conserving, which means that no output port may be idle as long as there is an input cell destined to it. Furthermore, the scheduler is required to be fair, which means that no input cell may be held at HOL for more than M cell times (M is the number of input ports). The aim is to find a work-conserving, fair policy that delivers maximum throughput and minimizes input queue latency. When a scheduling policy decides which cells to schedule, contention may require that it leave a residue of cells to be scheduled in the next cell time. The selection of where to place the residue uniquely defines the scheduling policy. It is demonstrated that a policy which always concentrates the residue, subject to our fairness constraint, always outperforms all other policies. We present one such policy, called TATRA, and analyze it geometrically. We also present a heuristic round-robin policy called mRRM that is simple to implement in hardware, fair, and performs quite well when compared to a concentrating algorithm.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/95/680/CSL-TR-95-680.pdf