Performance comparison of switch architectures with shareable parallel memory modules

The class of switches with shareable parallel memory modules include those switches that use parallel memory modules which are physically separate but logically shared. The two main classes of such architectures namely the Shared Multibuffer (SMB) based switch and the Sliding-Window (SW) based packet switch both deploy shareable parallel memory modules, however they differ in the switching scheme used by them to store incoming packets and transfer packets among different switch ports. In this letter, we investigate and compare the performance of switching schemes deployed by these two classes of switching architectures. We compare throughput and packet loss performance of these two switches under conditions of identical traffic type, switch configuration and memory resource deployed.