MCBF: a high-performance scheduling algorithm for buffered crossbar switches

The buffered crossbar architecture is becoming very attractive for the design of high performance routers due the unique features it offers. Many distributed scheduling algorithms have been proposed for this architecture. Despite their distributed nature, the existing schemes require quite a bit of hardware and timing complexity. We propose a novel scheduling scheme named the most critical buffer first (MCBF). This scheme is based only on the internal buffer information and requires much less hardware than the existing schemes. Yet, it exhibits good performance and outperforms all its competitors. More interestingly, MCBF shows optimal stability performance while being almost a stateless algorithm.