On the combined input-crosspoint buffered switch with round-robin arbitration

Input-buffered switches have been widely considered for implementing feasible packet switches. However, their matching process may not be time-efficient for switches with high-speed ports. Buffered crossbars (BXs) are an alternative to relax timing for packet switches with high-speed ports and to provide high-performance switching. BX switches were originally considered expensive, as the memory amount required in the crosspoints (XPs) is proportional to the square of the number of ports (O(N²)). This limitation is now less stringent with the advances on chip-fabrication techniques, and when considering small crosspoint (XP) buffer sizes. In this paper, we study a combined input-crosspoint buffered packet switch, named CIXB, with virtual output queues (VOQs) at the inputs, and arbitration based on round-robin selection. We show that the CIXB switch achieves 100% throughput under uniform traffic, and high performance under nonuniform traffic, using one-cell XP buffer size and no speedup.