Achieving fair service with a hybrid scheduling scheme for CICQ switches

Providing performance guarantees for arriving traffic flows has become an important measure for today’s routing and switching systems. However, none of current scheduling algorithms built on CICQ (combined input and cross-point buffered) switches can provide flow level performance guarantees. Aiming at meeting this requirement, the feasibility of implementing flow level scheduling is discussed thoroughly. Then, based on the discussion, it comes up with a hybrid and stratified fair scheduling (HSFS) scheme, which is hierarchical and hybrid, for CICQ switches. With HSFS, each input port and output port can schedule variable length packets independently with a complexity of O(1). Theoretical analysis show that HSFS can provide delay bound, service rate and fair performance guarantees without speedup. Finally, we implement HSFS in SPES (switch performance evaluation system) to verify the analytical results.