Scheduling multicast traffic in input-buffered ATM switch

Performance of an input-buffered ATM switch is limited by the head-of-line (HOL) blocking problem. HOL blocking is even more pronounced in multicast switch where cells compete for multiple outputs simultaneously. Previous studies in input-buffered unicast switch have shown that HOL blocking can only be eliminated by using per-output queuing and sophisticated scheduling methods, such as the maximal weight matching (MWM) or the parallel iterative matching (PIM) methods. The MWM or PIM types of scheduling algorithm cannot be applied to multicast switch because of the high computation complexity. In this paper, we present a reservation based scheduling algorithm, which employs per-VC queuing for multicast connections and per-output queuing for unicast connections. Instead of the input ports sending a huge amount of state information to the output ports for processing, we circulate reservation vectors amongst the input ports. Each input port will then make reservation based on its local state and the availability of the output ports. The scheduling is done on a frame by frame basis. While the input ports are transmitting cells according to the schedule of the current frame, the next frame schedule is computed. Simulations reveal that our method substantially outperforms the methods that employ FIFO queuing discipline.