Making parallel packet switches practical

A parallel packet switch (PPS) is a switch in which the memories run slower than the line rate. Arriving packets are spread (or load-balanced) packet-by-packet over multiple slower-speed packet switches. It is already known that with a speedup of S⩾2, a PPS can theoretically mimic a FCFS output-queued (OQ) switch. However, the theory relies on a centralized packet scheduling algorithm that is essentially impractical because of high communication complexity. In this paper, we attempt to make a high performance PPS practical by introducing two results. First, we show that small co-ordination buffers can eliminate the need for a centralized packet scheduling algorithm, allowing a full distributed implementation with low computational and communication complexity. Second, we show that without speedup, the resulting PPS can mimic an FCFS OQ switch within a delay bound