Distributed Scheduling in Input Queued Switches

Dealing with RTTs (round trip time) in IQ switches has been recently recognized as a challenging problem, especially if considering distributed (multi-chip) scheduler implementation which are suited to reduce the hardware complexity in very large, high-speed, switches. Traditional iterative three- or two-phase scheduling algorithms are based on a monolithic implementation, thus allowing instantaneous information exchange among input and output selectors to determine a matching. Multi-chip implementation imply that information exchange among inputs and outputs is delayed by an inter-chip latency. This delay requires non-trivial modifications to scheduling algorithms to allow a fully distributed implementation while keeping good performance. We propose a new scheduling algorithm, named SRR (synchronous round robin), which is suited to a fully distributed implementation and provides good performance if compared with more complex, non fully distributed, previously proposed scheduling algorithms.