Serenade

Most of today’s high-speed switches and routers adopt an input-queued crossbar switch architecture. Such a switch needs to compute a matching (crossbar schedule) between the input ports and output ports during each switching cycle (time slot). A key research challenge in designing large (in number of input/output ports N) input-queued crossbar switches is to develop crossbar scheduling algorithms that can compute “high quality” matchings – i.e., those that result in high switch throughput (ideally 100%) and low queueing delays for packets – at line rates. SERENA is arguably the best algorithm in that regard: It outputs excellent matching decisions that result in 100% switch throughput and near-optimal queueing delays. However, since SERENA is a centralized algorithm with O(N) computational complexity, it cannot support switches that both are large (in terms of N) and have a very high line rate per port. In this work, we propose SERENADE (SERENA, the Distributed Edition), a parallel algorithm suite that emulates SERENA in only O(logN) iterations between input ports and output ports, and hence has a time complexity of only O(logN) per port. Through extensive simulations, we show that all three variants in the SERENADE suite can, either provably or empirically, achieve 100% throughput, and that they have similar delay performances as SERENA under heavy traffic loads.