Frame-Scheduling for Input-Queued Switches with Energy Reconfiguration Costs

We consider a slotted input-queued switch with a crossbar-like switching fabric. In each time-slot, a centralized scheduler determines a switching fabric configuration to transfer packets. We consider the energy consumption needed to configure the switching fabric and we assume that the energy depends on the number of modifications in the switching configuration in two consecutive time-slots. We address the problem of scheduling a set of packets to minimize the required energy while preserving high throughput. We reduce the overall problem to the combination of two different optimization problems. We propose a family of algorithms to solve the problem and we discuss their energy-throughput performance.