Padded Frames: A Novel Algorithm for Stable Scheduling in Load-Balanced Switches

The load-balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann switching architecture consists of two stages: a load balancer and a deterministic input-queued crossbar switch. The advantages of this architecture are its simplicity and scalability, while its main drawback is the possible out-of-sequence reception of packets belonging to the same flow. Several solutions have been proposed to overcome this problem; among the most promising are the uniform frame spreading (UFS) and the full ordered frames first (FOFF) algorithms. In this paper, we present a new algorithm called padded frames (PF), which eliminates the packet reordering problem, achieves 100% throughput, and improves the delay performance of previously known algorithms.